Design of a Flexible High-Density Surface Electromyography Sensor

Abstract

In recent years, high-density surface electromyography (HD-sEMG) has shown promising advantages in many robotics applications. Using HD-sEMG can not only reduce the sensitivity of the sensor position on the muscle belly but can also facilitate the acquisition of more muscle activity information due to spatial sampling. As current commercial HD-EMG systems use stationary amplifiers, leading to bulky measurements and poor portability, the interest in developing an HD-EMG sensor has increased. However, the insufficient electrode density and complicated fabrication process are challenges to overcome. In this paper, we propose a flexible HD-EMG sensor with an on-board amplifier capable of a density level of 0.53 channel/cm², higher than those in previous works. First, we investigated the effects of different sensor parameters (i.e., the electrode material, the inter-electrode distance (IED) and the size of the electrode) on the measured signal quality. Second, a low-cost, easily fabricated, easily customized HD-EMG fabrication method was proposed based on the selected sensor parameters with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) comparable to those of commercial sensors. Finally, we applied a muscle activation estimation algorithm to validate the feasibility of the designed HD-EMG sensor, showing higher estimation accuracy levels. The results here demonstrate that the designed HD-EMG sensor can be used as an effective human-machine interface for robotics applications.