A piezoresistive sensor to measure muscle contraction and mechanomyography

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EMG-based applications traditionally suffered from many drawbacks, mainly related to the stability of skin-electrodes contact during long-term monitoring. Dry electrodes promised to solve part of these issues, but, in the past decades, their use provided minimal improvements. The ultimate frontier of EMG-based applications relies on the implementation of fully electrodeless front-end electronics. 

Recently, we presented a low-cost, electrodeless sensor, based on Force Sensitive Resistor, which is able to simultaneously measure muscle contraction and the mechanomyogram, i.e. the small mechanical vibrations that occur during muscle contraction.

The sensor is coupled with the skin through a simple rigid dome and, via a trans-impedance amplifier conditioning circuit, proved capable to consistently generate a signal that is comparable to the well-established EMG linear envelope. 

Moreover, the sensor provides other benefits, such as removing the need for noise or artifacts rejection circuitry, high sample rate, and additional computational load to compute the linear envelope.

This novel sensor provides a new option for the improvement of prosthetic control and human-machine interface applications.

Click here to access the full-text article at Sensors MDPI

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