A Wearable Armband System for Multichannel Surface Electromyography Detection

Surface electromyography (sEMG) signals are a non-invasive measure of the electrical activity generated in the muscle contraction processes, which has valuable applications in areas such as clinical diagnosis, prosthesis control, and gesture recognition. In this work, the design of a wearable wireless system, named WyoFlex, with 4 channels for detecting sEMG signals in the forearm is presented. The designed system comprises 4 Gravity Analog EMG sensors manufactured by OYMotion. Also, a FireBeetle ESP32-E microcontroller was used to acquire the sEMG signals with a resolution of 12 bits and a sample rate of 1000 Hz. As part of the wireless communication system, the user datagram protocol has been implemented to send the information to a graphical user interface developed in the Node-RED environment. To validate the band, a set of signal detection experiments on 6 healthy volunteers using the system was executed; the obtained results give an idea about the principal frequency components of each hand motion that are similar in the participants. The above, confirmed the correct functionality of the band as a wearable device for sEMG acquisition signals.