2015 2nd International Conference on Biomedical Engineering (ICoBE), 30-31 March 2015, Penang
Electromyography (EMG) based Signal Analysis for
Physiological Device Application in Lower Limb
Rehabilitation
Nurhazimah Nazmi, Mohd Azizi Abdul Rahman*,
Saiful Amri Mazlan, Hairi Zamzuri
Malaysia Japan International Institute of Technology
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
nurhazimah2@live.utm.my
azizi.kl@utm.my*
Abstract—Electromyography (EMG) is an experiment-based
method for evaluating and recording a series of electrical signals
that emanate from body muscles. The electrical manifestation of
neuromuscular activation generated in muscles during
contraction and/or relaxation is known as EMG signals. In this
paper, a preliminary study is conducted in order to improve the
fitness of post-stroke survivors with a minimal supervision from
therapists in physiological activity especially on the lower limb
rehabilitation. Therefore, a pattern recognition technique is
required to extract the important features of an EMG signal to
control the physiological devices (PDs), for instance, cycling-like
and stepping-like machines in a lower limb rehab application. A
new approach for feature extraction vectors in a recognition
system will be proposed using Discrete Wavelet Transform
(DWT) and Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) algorithms. In addition to
this, a Principle Component Analysis (PCA) method will be
utilized to reduce the dimension of data in prior to computing the
classification accuracy using the Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference
System (ANFIS).
Keywords—Electromyography (EMG), Signal Processing,
Physiological Device, Rehabilitation.
I. INTRODUCTION
A. Overview
Physical therapy in rehabilitation assists individuals to
improve and recover as much independence as possible from
muscle injuries. The World Health Organization had described
rehabilitation as ‘the combined and coordinated use of medical,
social, educational and vocational measures for training and
retraining the individual to the highest level of functional
ability’. Physiological device (PDs) such as cycling and stepper
are the instruments for physical activities during rehabilitation.
Magnetorheological (MR) is a class of smart materials in
which the mechanical properties such as stiffness, viscosity and
hardness will change when subjected to a magnetic field. MR
fluid needs to vary the stiffness (i.e., Hard, Medium and Soft
modes) in MR device to monitor the level of rehabilitation
progress. MR fluid is a fluid suspension made from a mixture
978-1-4799-1749-5/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE
Makoto Mizukawa
Department of Electrical Engineering
Shibaura Insitute of Technology
Tokyo, Japan
mizukawa@sic.shibaura-it.ac.jp
between micro-size ferrous particle, base liquid and some
additives. MR fluid is very sensitive rheological properties of
magnetic field [1]. Fig. 1 illustrates the scenario in
rehabilitation activities by using a stepper.
MR
Damper
Fig. 1. The scenario in rehabilitation activities
The MR device is used as actuator within the PDs. So, the
current (e.g., range between 0.1A - 0.9A) generated from the
magnetic field will be induced to PDs. Furthermore, there are
two processes need to be done before the induced process
which are:
• The fusion of Electrocardiography (ECG) and
Electromyography (EMG) signals.
• Interface system.
Thus, the result obtained from the fusion of ECG and EMG
in term of voltage will be used as an input for interface system
to control the performance level of rehabilitation exercise. Fig.
2 represents the overview of the rehabilitation process of
controlling the PDs. This paper will focus on the analysis of
EMG signals.
B. Electromyography (EMG)
Basically, EMG signals are formed by the electrical
manifestation of the neuromuscular activation generated in
muscles during contraction or relaxation [2]. Physical therapies
in rehabilitation are usually done for post-stroke survivors
since the burden of stroke had caused difficulties in nerve or
muscle disabilities in which affecting their daily routines.
According to National Stroke Association of Malaysia
 Fig. 2. An overview of the physiological activity in rehabilitation
(NASAM), stroke is the third largest cause of death in
Malaysia. Stroke is estimated to hit six Malaysians, every hour
and approximately 40 thousand people in a year. In addition,
three out of four individuals would survive beyond the acute
phase of stroke due to advancement of acute management of
stroke [3].
Stroke rehabilitation center provides a physiological
activities treatment and therapy for stroke survivors under the
supervision of therapists. The meaningful interpretation of the
EMG signal is usually performed by a well-trained personnel
[4]. Nonetheless, the progress for stroke survivors to recover
had been delayed due to the limited number of therapists in
Malaysia. Thus, an approach for improving fitness in the post-
stroke rehab application is suggested.
In this study, the PDs are expected to maximize patient’s
training time. Therefore, analysis of EMG signals is conducted
to overcome the fear of pain and re-injury. Luca clarified that
EMG signal is a complicated signal influenced by the
anatomical and physiological properties of muscles and the
control scheme of the nervous system [2]. In general, the
analysis of EMG signals had been widely used in many
applications including clinical and biomedical engineering,
prosthesis or rehabilitation devices and etc [5]. There are many
techniques for analyzing the EMG waveform such as:
• Wavelet analysis [6].
• Higher Order Statistic (HOS) [7].
• Fuzzy Logic (FL) [5].
• Artificial Neural Network (ANN) [8].
However, Xie et al. claimed that soft computing (SC)
techniques have been proposed to be applied in EMG-related
pattern classification and regression problems [9]. Therefore
SC methods are a combination of the following approaches
[10]:
• ANN + FL.
• Evolutionary Computing (EC) + Swarm Intelligence
(SI).
In this study, we aim at improving existing approaches of
the feature extraction to achieve at least 99% accuracy of the
EMG signal as compared to the work done in [11] and to
identify the types of muscle contractions to provide an input
signal for the PDs. As a result, we expect that the proposed
framework would help give a better response and appropriate
to be applied for controlling the PDs during physical therapy
activity in rehab.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II
discusses previous work done by the researcher in the context
of feature extraction, dimensionality reduction and
classification. In Section III, detail of the proposed approach is
explained. Finally, we conclude this paper in section IV.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
EMG signals reflect the electric current generated by the
ionic flow across the membrane of the muscle fibers that
propagates through the intervening tissues to reach the
detection surface of an electrode located [7]. According to
Surface Electromyography for the Non-Invassive Assessment
of Muscles (SENIAM), a good electrode-skin contact is
important to obtain accurate surface EMG recordings in terms
of amplitude characteristics, smaller artifacts, less risk of
imbalance between the electrodes and less noises.
As mentioned in section I, several researchers had explored
some advance techniques of EMG signal analysis because
EMG signals are complex. Zhou et al. identified that the
median frequency of EMG is 69.5 Hz, while the ECG median
frequency is around 22.1 Hz [12]. In order to remove the
unnecessary ECG artifact from surface EMG signals, the
authors suggested fifth-order Butterworth high-filtering with
cutoff frequencies of 40 Hz where the remaining EMG
decreased to 98% and remaining ECG decreased to 27%.
Moreover, Reaz et al. clarified that full-wave rectification more
preferred by researchers as it considers the absolute values of
each data point [13].
A. Feature Extraction
For feature extraction, a raw EMG signal is represented as a
feature vector and used as an input to the classifier. The feature
extraction provides pattern information by having particular
variables or parameters in signal processing. The success of a
pattern classification system relies upon the choice of features
used to represent the raw EMG signals [14]. A time-frequency
analysis had received substantial attention rather than
independent time and frequency analysis of highly fluctuated
waveforms. The examples of time-frequency approaches are
[15]:
• Choi Williams Distribution (CWD).
• Wavelet Transforms (WT).
• Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT).
• Wavelet Packet Transform (WPT).
WT is an efficient mathematical tool to analyze a highly
fluctuated signal like EMG [16]. WT had good resolution and
high performance for visualization of neuropathy (e.g.,
muscular disease) and myopathy (e.g., nerve damage) activities
compared to STFT [17]. WT consists of continuous and
discrete forms. Discrete wavelet transforms (DWT) is a special
form of WT whereas it provide an effective processing of the
signal in time and frequency domains [10]. DWT had been
used as feature extraction in real-time signals of hand motion
commands [11] and differentiating types of muscle movements
[8]. On the other hand, Khusaba and Al-Jumaily proposed a
novel approach of feature extraction which combined the
Wavelet Packet Transforms (WPT) that extracts the features of
the EMG signal from multiple channels with the Fuzzy C-
Means (FCM) in order to determine those wavelet features that
are maximized the classification [16].
FCM is one of clustering techniques, which had been used
very successfully in many applications especially in pattern
classification. A Fuzzy logic approach has been proven to be
used in data analysis, decision making and other fields in the
biomedical sciences [16]. Explicitly, an FCM algorithm yields
excellent classification accuracy in pattern recognition as
mentioned by Kocyigit and Korurek [18]. The FCM algorithm
attempts to cluster the pattern by minimizing an objective
function dependent of cluster locations [19].
B. Dimensionality Reduction
To prevent classification overload, extraction features’
variables or parameters were reduced in the dimension by
using different dimension reduction methods [6]. The purpose
of dimensionality reduction methods is to decrease the burden
of the classifier and computational time. Other than that,
Principle Component Analysis (PCA) is a well-known method
than other methods of dimension reduction [20]. Englehart et
al. proved that PCA greatly improves the classification
accuracy in myoelectric-controlled prosthesis application when
wavelet-based feature set is reduced in dimension by PCA
[21].
C. Classification
Recently, many researchers were interested in an effective
means of classifying EMG signal patterns. The classifiers that
usually used in previous studies for EMG applications are as
follows [22]:
• ANN.
• FL.
• Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA).
• Self-Organizing Map (SOM).
• Support Vector Machines (SVM).
• Choi Williams Distribution (CWD).
An ANN approach is suitable for modeling nonlinear data
due to it is able to cover the distinctions among different
conditions [6]. ANN had been successfully classified four hand
motions (left, right, up and down) with the average success rate
is 88.4% [24]. However, the precision of ANN output is always
limited to least square errors [9]. Although studied within the
Fuzzy Logic systems expert utilizes the IF-THEN rules are
capable to emulate human decision making more closely than
the other classifiers, there are critiques concerning the fuzzy
logic algorithms. The fuzzy logic algorithms are claimed to be
a complicated technique to determine the correct set of fuzzy
rules and membership functions to describe system behavior
[9]. The authors also clarified that FL approaches require more
system memory and processing time as the use of fuzzy logic
limits system knowledge more in the rule base than in the
membership function base of fixed geometric-shaped
membership functions.
Neuro-fuzzy systems are a combination of ANN and FL
techniques. These methods have been widely explored in EMG
pattern recognition. Works done by Khushaba and Al-Jumaily
produce about 99% classification accuracy by using multilayer
perception (MLP) to classify human forearm motions [16].
Adaptive Neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) is a kind of
neural network structure based on Takagi–Sugeno fuzzy
inference system. It has the potential to capture the benefits of
both techniques in a single framework by integrates both neural
networks and fuzzy logic principles. Sugeno fuzzy model-
based Adaptive Neuro-fuzzy system had been used to classify
seven distinct movements in a longer test duration lasting for
about three hours, achieving in an average accuracy of 86%
[4]. The study on real-time intelligent pattern recognition
algorithm for surface EMG signal provides 97% average
accuracy using ANFIS approach [23]. Table I shows the
comparison of EMG signal analysis by past researchers.
TABLE I: COMPARISON OF EMG SIGNAL ANALYSIS
Author Features Extraction Classifier Accuracy
[16] WPT + Fuzzy C-Means MLP 99%
[4] RMS ANFIS 86%
[23] WT ANFIS 97%
[11] DWT ANFIS 92%
[8] DWT FCNN 98%
 Fig. 3. The proposed system
III. PROPOSED FRAMEWORK
In this research, the raw EMG signals collected from
surface electrode attached on gastrocnemius and soleus muscle
of the leg are analyzed using Synergy on Nicolet EDX 6
Channels EMG System, Natus. This paper focus on post-stroke
patients only and the medical history data act as a reference.
Fig. 3 shows the proposed system which consists of four
stages:
• Signal pre-processing
• Feature extraction
• Dimensionality reduction
• Classification
A. The Proposed Process
1) Data acquisition: Initially, experiments will be
conducted by recording the data related to muscle contraction
using the EMG instrument (e.g., Synergy on Nicolet EDX 6
Channels EMG System, Natus). The instrument is 6 Channel
amplifier 10.3” L x 8” W x 1.5” H (26 x 20.3 x 4 cm), 1.6lb
(0.7 kg) includes:
• Input impedance: 1000 M (± 10%, < 30pF)
• Noise level typical (RMS): 0.7μV
• Common mode rejection: >110dB
• Filters: high pass (30 Hz - 20 kHz), low pass (0.1 Hz -
2 kHz)
Fig. 4. The experimental procedures
In order to find the initial association rules, twenty healthy
male and female volunteers (e.g., aged between 40-50) need to
undergo simple tasks such as aggressive and mild. Fig. 4 shows
the experimental procedures of the proposed process with the
guidelines by SENIAM. An unfiltered (exception: amplifier
bandpass) and unprocessed signal detecting the superposed
Motor Unit Action Potentials (MUAPs) are called a raw EMG
signal. The raw EMG transmitted waveforms is displayed on
the screen. Then, the raw data EMG will be recorded and saved
in a comma-separated values (CSV) format.
Fig. 5. Raw EMG signal of healthy people in a relaxed state
In this paper, the intial data provided by [25] is used to prove
our proposed system. The data recorded from tibialis anterior
muscle of a healthy male, 44 years old in a relaxed state for ten
seconds with sampling frequency, 4000 Hz. Fig. 5 shows the
raw EMG signal of the volunteers.
2) Pre-processing: The collected data commonly contain
noises. Corrupted EMG signals are the major problem in the
analysis. A signal enhancement (pre-processing) consists two
steps: filtering and rectification is applied to extract
unintended features (e.g., ECG noise contained in the EMG
signal, unintended features and etc.). In this paper, fifth-order
Butterworth high-pass filtering with cutoff frequencies of 40
Hz is applied for substantial cancellation of ECG artifact in
EMG signal using MATLAB software (see Fig.6).
Fig. 6. Fifth-order Butterworth high-pass filtering on the ECG artifact removal
with cutoff frequencies of 40 Hz
 Then, the filtered of EMG signal is rectified using full-
wave rectification (see Fig. 7). Despite of that, the processed
data will be compared to the existing medical history data of
patients collected form Hospital Kuala Lumpur (HKL) and
validate the data through the experiment.
Fig. 7. Full-wave rectification of EMG signal
3) Feature Extraction: The DWT are used to extract the
features of rectified data of EMG and then the FCM algorithm
are employed to vary on feature suitability for classification.
FCM will minimize an objective function dependent of cluster
locations.
4) Dimensionality Reduction: PCA is used to reduce the
dimensionality of the features retained after removing the
nondistinguishing feature.
5) Classification: ANFIS approach will be used to classify
the pattern of muscle activities. The result of pattern muscle
contractions will consider as an input of the interface stage to
control the signal. Fig. 8 shows the expected result of EMG
signals during tonic isometric voluntary contraction at 10%
(weak), 40% (moderate) and 70% (strong) of maximal
voluntary contraction for gastrocnemius and soleus muscle.
Fig. 8. Expected results of classification (a) weak contraction, (b) moderate
contraction and (c) strong contraction
As declared before, the range of induced current in the MR
device is from 0.1A to 0.9A. Table II represents the simplified
outcome from this study. From the table, we can determine if
the contractions of the muscle are higher, then the range of
induced current to the PDs should be low and vice versa.
TABLE II: THE PERCENTAGE OF CONTRACTIONS OF MUSCLE AND THEIR
CURRENT RANGE
Contractions (%) Current Range (A)
10 (Weak) 0.6 - 0.9
40 (Moderate) 0.3 - 0.6
70 (Strong) 0.1 - 0.3
IV. CONCLUSION
This paper presented a preliminary work on the
classification pattern of muscle contraction activities. The
information is acquired in order to control PDs in rehabilitation
exercise (e.g., cycling and stepper) for post-stroke patients.
Basically, the aim of this paper is to improve the existing
approach of the feature extraction in a pattern system by using
DWT and FCM. Then, Principle Component Analysis (PCA) is
utilized to reduce the size of data before computing the
classification accuracy with Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference
System (ANFIS). Therefore, the proposed approach as
discusses in Section III, we expect to enhance the accuracy of
the EMG signal in order to implement the result as an input
signal to control the PDs.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The work presented in this study is funded by Ministry of
Education Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia under
research university grant. VOTE NO: 01K16.
REFERENCES
[1] I. Ismail, S. A. Mazlan, H. Zamzuri, and A. G. Olabi, “Fluid
particle separation of magnetorheological fluid in squeeze
mode,” Japanese Journal of Applied Physics, vol. 51, p. 067301,
May 2012.
[2] C. J. D. Luca, “Electromyography. Encyclopedia of medical
devices and instrumentation,” (John G. Webster, Ed.) John
Wiley Publisher, 98-109, 2006.
[3] N. A. Aziz and A. A. Raymond, “Managing Further
Rehabilitation in Longer-Term Stroke Patients in the
Community : A New Approach,” vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 1–6, 2008.
[4] A. Balbinot and G. Favieiro, “A neuro-fuzzy system for
characterization of arm movements,” Sensors (Basel,
Switzerland), vol. 13, pp. 2613–30, Jan. 2013.
[5] R. H. Chowdhury, M. B. I. Reaz, M. A. B. M. Ali, A. a. a.
Bakar, K. Chellappan, and T. G. Chang, “Surface
electromyography signal processing and classi¿cation
techniques.,” Sensors (Basel, Switzerland), vol. 13, pp. 12431–
66, Jan. 2013.
[6] D. K. Kumar, N. D. Pah, and A. Bradley, “Wavelet analysis of
surface electromyography to determine muscle fatigue.,” IEEE
transactions on neural systems and rehabilitation engineering : a
publication of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology
Society, vol. 11, pp. 400–6, Dec. 2003.
[7] S. Shahid, J. Walker, G. M. Lyons, C. A. Byrne, and A. Nene,
“Application of higher order statistics techniques to EMG
signals to characterize the motor unit action potential,” no. Vl,
pp. 1–16, Jan. 2005.
[8] B. KarlȚk, Y. Kocyigit, and M. Korurek, “Differentiating types
of muscle movements using a wavelet based fuzzy clustering
neural network,” Expert Systems, vol. 26, pp. 49–59, Feb. 2009.
[9] H. B. Xie, T. Guo, S. Bai, and S. Dokos, “Hybrid soft
computing systems for electromyographic signals analysis: a
review,” Biomedical engineering online, vol. 13, p. 8, Jan. 2014.
[10] S. S. Ray and S. K. Pal, “RNA secondary structure prediction
using soft computing.,” IEEE/ACM transactions on
computational biology and bioinformatics / IEEE, ACM, vol.
10, no. 1, pp. 2–17, 2013.
[11] M. Khezri and M. Jahed, “A neurofuzzy inference system for
sEMG based identi¿cation of hand motion commands,” IEEE
Transactions on Industrial Electronics, vol. 58, pp. 1952–1960,
May 2011.
[12] P. Zhou, B. Lock, and T. a. Kuiken, “Real time ECG artifact
removal for myoelectric prosthesis control.,” Physiological
measurement, vol. 28, pp. 397–413, Apr. 2007.
[13] M. B. I. Raez, M. S. Hussain, and F. Mohd-Yasin, “Techniques
of EMG signal analysis: detection, processing, classi¿cation and
applications.,” Biological procedures online, vol. 8, pp. 11–35,
Jan. 2006.
[14] B. Hudgins, P. Parker, S. Member, N. Robert, and S. Member,
“A new strategy for multifunction myoelectric control,” vol. 40,
no. I, pp. 82– 94, 1993.
[15] A. N. Norali, M. H. M. Som, and J. Kangar-arau, “Surface
electromyography signal processing and application : a review,”
no. October, pp. 11–13, 2009.
[16] R. N. Khushaba and A. Al-Jumaily, “Fuzzy wavelet packet
based feature extraction method for multifunction myoelectric
control,” International Journal of Biomedical Sciences 2 (3),
186-194, June, 2007.
[17] M. R. Canal, “Comparison of wavelet and short time fourier
transform methods in the analysis of EMG signals,” Journal of
Medical Systems, vol. 34, pp. 91–94, Oct. 2008.
[18] Y. Kocyigit, and M. Korurek, “EMG signal classification using
wavelet transform and fuzzy clustering algorithms,” Proceeding
of ELECO 2003 Bursa, Turkey, pp. 1–3, 2003.
[19] M. A. Balafar, “Fuzzy C-mean based brain MRI segmentation
algorithms,” Arti¿cial Intelligence Review, vol. 41, pp. 441–
449, Mar. 2012.
[20] M. A. Oskoei and H. Hu, “Myoelectric control systems: a
survey,” Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, vol. 2, pp.
275–294, Oct. 2007.
[21] K. Englehart, B. Hudgins, P. A. Parker, and S. Member, “A
wavelet based continuous classi¿cation scheme for
multifunction myoelectric control,” vol. 48, no. 3, pp. 302–311,
2001.
[22] A. Phinyomark, P. Phukpattaranont, and C. Limsakul, “Feature
reduction and selection for EMG signal classi¿cation,” Expert
Systems with Applications, vol. 39, pp. 7420–7431, June 2012.
[23] M. Khezri and M. Jahed, “Real-time intelligent pattern
recognition algorithm for surface EMG signals.,” Biomedical
engineering online, vol. 6, p. 45, Jan. 2007.
[24] R. Ahsan, M. I. Ibrahimy, and O. O. Khalifa, “Neural network
classi¿er for hand motion detection from emg signal,” pp. 536–
541, 2011.
[25] A. L. Goldberger, L. A. N. Amaral, L. Glass, J. M. Hausdorff, P.
C. Ivanov, R. G. Mark, J. E. Mietus, G. B. Moody, C.-K. Peng,
and H. E. Stanley, “PhysioBank, PhysioToolkit, and PhysioNet:
Components of a new research resource for complex
physiologic signals,” Circulation, vol. 101, no. 23, pp. e215–
e220, 2000 (June 13). Circulation Electronic Pages:
http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/101/23/e215
PMID:1085218; doi: 10.1161/01.CIR.101.23.e215.