EMG Muscle Control Devices

Here is the video about a muscle control device I mentioned in class. It is very similar to your project. You may be able to find more valuable info through this thread. Good luck!

Progress Report: 2/7/16

Since the last progress update we have made a lot of progress. Firstly, we researched the extrinsic muscles of the hand that are responsible for finger movement. We created a table that covered all of the necessary information, which would allow for more precise placement of electrodes and thus better data gathering. We have gotten Matlab to work, using code that we found online. The code forms a graph from the data that comes in through Arduino, and we saved the numerical values. We have been recording data from the extensor digiti minimi because it is the only muscle that we could find that was both superficial and responsible for only one muscle movement. We recorded each finger's extension from that muscle with the hopes of finding a pattern or seeing how much interference is involved. After recording the data in each finger, we found the maximum points from each finger extension, and then found the average value of that maximum EMG reading, which we did in Excel.

Some problems we encountered were what to save the Matlab workspace as, since we saved it as a .mat rather than a .m. Another problem we have encountered is that a lot of the muscles that are clearly defined as affecting only one finger are deep muscles, meaning it will be harder to record data. Another problem is that certain fingers don't have a unique muscle that we can measure. We also are limited by the fact that we have only one recorder for EMG signals, since we only can record one channel at a time.

Our goals are to figure out which finger we are going to record next, and also to do some coding in Matlab to try and cut down on the amount of time that it takes to get the maximums from Matlab automatically.