MyoVibe: vibration based wearable muscle activation detection in high mobility exercises

Skeletal muscles are activated to generate the force needed for movement in most high motion sports and exercises. However, incorrect skeletal muscle activation during these sports and exercises, can lead to sub-optimal performance and injury. Existing techniques are susceptible to motion artifacts, particularly when used in high motion sports (e.g. jumping, cycling, etc.). They require limited body movement, or experts to manually interpret results, making them unsuitable in sports scenarios. This paper presents MyoVibe, a wearable system for determining muscle activation in high motion exercise scenarios. MyoVibe senses muscle vibration signals obtained from a wearable network of accelerometers to determine muscle activation. By modeling the characteristics of muscles and high motion noise using extreme value analysis, MyoVibe can reduce noise due to high mobility exercises. Our system can predict muscle activation with greater than 97% accuracy in isometric low motion exercise cases, up to 90% accuracy in high motion exercises.