Design and Experimental Validation of a Synchronous Wireless Acquisition System of EMG and Muscle Impedance Signals

Electromyogram (EMG)1 and muscle impedance signals are two important physiological parameters that reflect the state of muscles. They can be used to evaluate the motor function status of muscles, and thus their synchronous acquisition would be very significant in the fields of the rehabilitation medicine and rehabilitation engineering. In this paper, a Bluetooth data acquisition system was designed by using ADS1292R, STM8 and HJ-580X Bluetooth chips for recording EMG and muscle impedance signal simultaneously and wirelessly. The system is composed of two parts: the host computer and the slave microcontroller. The slave microcontroller is in charge of data acquisition and wireless transmission, while the host computer performs data receiving, displaying, processing and saving. The system was applied to the measurement of subcutaneous EMG and muscle impedance signals in rats. Our results showed that the system could accurately collect the signals of EMG and muscle impedance, which would be utilized to characterize the muscle activity.