Electromyography (EMG)

• EMG is the process of measuring the electrical activity of the

muscles.
• Every cell in the human body creates some electric activity
as part of its normal functioning.
• Muscle cells produce electrical signals that cause muscles to
contract and relax.
• EMG records these signals using either electrodes placed
on the surface of the skin or inserting needles with
electrodes in the muscle.

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Electromyography (EMG)
Sample of an EMG signal obtained from the right bicep

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EMG in Computer Science
• EMG can be employed to classify muscle activity during
performing different movements and actions.

• For example, gesture recognition is used to recognize

different hand patterns, by identifying each pattern’s EMG,
and translates each pattern to a specified action.

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EMG Interfacing
• An interface device based on an EMG Switch can be used
to control moving objects, such as mobile robots or an
electric wheelchair.
• Surface EMG recordings may also be a suitable control
signal for some interactive video games.
• EMG can be used to recognize unvoiced speech by
observing the EMG activity of muscles associated with
speech. It is targeted for use in noisy environments, and
may be helpful for people without vocal cords.

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Practical EMG Circuit

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Practical EMG Circuit Output

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Applications

Build a project to control a servo motor by your EMG signal

acquired from the forearm (or the biceps) muscle.

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Electrooculogram (EOG)

• EOG is a technique used to measure the electrical activity

of eyes.

• EOG is often used to measure

the gaze angle of the eye when it
moves towards one direction.
• An EOG records eye movement
by detecting a voltage difference
between the cornea and retina.

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 Electrooculogram (EOG)
• The cornea (front) has a
positive polarity. The
retina (back) has a
negative polarity. As the
eye moves, the vector of
the electric field between
cornea and retina
changes with respect to
recording electrodes
placed in the skin at fixed
points.

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 Applications of EOG
• As an artificial intelligence application, EOG can be used to detect the
four main eye movements (left, right, up, and down).
• Based on the classification of EOG of different movements of the eye,
EOG can be used to control external devices (e.g., wheelchair, robot
arm, game, etc.).

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 Chapter 2
Biomedical Signal Processing

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 Frequency domain
• Recall that the time domain represents the variation of the signal
amplitude over time.
• Unlike the time domain, the frequency domain is a relationship between
the frequency in x-axis and the signal amplitude in y-axis.

Frequency domain is a representation which describes the frequency contents in a signal.

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 Fourier Transform
• Fourier Transform is a mathematical transformation which is used to
transform the signal from the time domain to the frequency domain.

• The Fourier transform converts the time function into a set of sine waves
that represent different frequencies.

• The frequency-domain representation of a signal is known as the

"spectrum" of frequency components.

• There are two versions of the Fourier transform; the conventional Fourier
transform, which is concerned with analog signals, and the discrete
Fourier transform (DFT), which is concerned with digital signals.
𝑁−1
−𝑗2𝜋𝑘𝑛
𝑋 𝑘 = ෍𝑥 𝑛 𝑒 𝑁
𝑛=0 13
 Analog and Digital Signals
Analog signals
• analog signals have infinitely variable values at all times, denoted as
x(t).

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 Analog and Digital Signals
Digital signals
• Digital signals are discrete in time and in value.
• It is often obtained by sampling analog signals, resulting a number of
samples at discrete times.
• The rate at which the signal is sampled is called the sampling frequency.
• Sampling process produces sequence of numbers (e.g. x[0], x[1], x[2], ).
• The device that is used to convert an analog signal to a digital signal is
called ADC (analog-to-digital converter).
• Digital signal is simple to process, store, and transmit.

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 Analog and Digital Signals
Digital signals

Resulting code

0101 0111 1000 1001 1010 1010 1010 1001 …..

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 The Frequency Domain and the Noise
• The frequency domain is an efficient technique to study most of
signals, especially for eliminating the noise effect on the signal.
• When you see a corrupted signal in the time domain, it is
because that much of unwanted signals with different
frequencies (noise) are added to the original signal.

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 The Frequency Domain and the Noise
• This effect will be clear if you visualize the frequency domain of
that signal. You will see the frequency components of both the
original signal and the noise.
• By identifying the locations of the intended signal and the noise
contents in the frequency domain, it will be simple to extract the
original signal or to eliminate the noise by using filters.

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