Low-cost wearable multichannel surface EMG acquisition for prosthetic hand control

Prosthetic hand control based on the acquisition and processing of surface electromyography signals (sEMG) is a well-established method that makes use of the electric potentials evoked by the physiological contraction processes of one or more muscles. Furthermore intelligent mobile medical devices are on the brink of introducing safe and highly sophisticated systems to help a broad patient community to regain a considerable amount of life quality. The major challenges which are inherent in such integrated system's design are mainly to be found in obtaining a compact system with a long mobile autonomy, capable of delivering the required signal requirements for EMG based prosthetic control with up to 32 simultaneous acquisition channels and - with an eye on a possible future exploitation as a medical device - a proper perspective on a low priced system. Therefore, according to these requirements we present a wireless, mobile platform for acquisition and communication of sEMG signals embedded into a complete mobile control system structure. This environment further includes a portable device such as a laptop providing the necessary computational power for the control and a commercially available robotic hand-prosthesis. Means of communication among those devices are based on the Bluetooth standard. We show, that the developed low cost mobile device can be used for proper prosthesis control and that the device can rely on a continuous operation for the usual daily life usage of a patient.