ES triggered by muscle activation

Today, I tried to establish a system which can detect muscle activities and then trigger an electrical stimulation to help muscle contraction. One reason that I did this project is learning to control DAQ card by labview. The other is that I saw some functional electrical stimulation applications and tried to build a proto type system by myself.

1. The DS7 Digitimer is the electrical stimulation, here is the information: http://www.digitimer.com/pdf/digitimes/Digitimes%202009.pdf


2. The Electrogoniometer is to measure my elbow angle.


3. NI USB 6009 is a data acquisition card which can acquire analog inputs and send digital outputs.


4. The Logitech Webcam is used to record videos.


5. The BNC line is used to connect the trigger of DS7 Digitimer.

The concept of my program is pretty simple. When detecting muscle activation which is over a certain level, the DAQ card sends one digital signal to DS7 digitimer which stimulates muscle.


There is a problem that I do not have any amplifier to record the EMG. I use the sound card of my computer because a sound card is also a kind of DAQ card which can amplify sound signals and records them.

Here is my GUI of labview program. You can see I measured the EMG and joint angle. It also record the video. I can change the threshold which means the level of EMG signals need to over the setting level which trigger the ES.

Here is one thing that I should mention that I did not calibrate the voltage of EMG and the time scale. However, you can understand how it works on below movie.


It is a big sacrifice for me because the temperature is quite low today and I was naked when doing the project.