Muscle Fatigue Analysis During Welding Tasks Using sEMG and Recurrence Quantification Analysis

Surface Electromyography (Semg):

The use of sEMG (Surface Electromyography) has been shown to be one of the most effective and quantitative methods to evaluate muscle activity and risk factors (Dennerlein et al., 2003; Farina, 2006; Lowe et al., 2001; Panahi & Cho, 2016; Sporrong et al., 1999). Moreover, sEMG offers a great advantage to be used as a real-time measurement method. There are two major physiological elements of the muscle that affect the EMG signal: reduction in conduction velocity in the muscle fibers and enhanced motor unit synchronization, the state in which motor units fire at the same time. These phenomena cause the frequency of the EMG signal to decrease and the amplitude to increase. These two phenomena, reduction in conduction velocity and increase in motor unit synchronization, are believed to be the myoelectric manifestations of muscle fatigue (Farina et al., 2002; Jensen et al., 2000; Li et al., 2004). Muscle fatigue analysis using sEMG has shown promising results in quantifying muscle activation for ergonomic purposes (Peppoloni et al., 2016).