Estimating the EMG response exclusively to fatigue during sustained static maximum voluntary contraction

TL;DR

This study proposes a method to isolate EMG RMS responses attributable solely to fatigue during sustained static contractions, demonstrating that RMS increases with fatigue even as muscle force declines, indicating its potential as a fatigue indicator.

Contribution

A novel method was developed to exclude muscle force effects from EMG RMS, enabling more accurate fatigue assessment during static contractions.

Findings

EMG RMS increases by 21.27% during fatigue

Muscle force decreases to 50% MVC while RMS increases

RMS can serve as an exclusive indicator of fatigue

Abstract

The increase of surface electromyography (sEMG) root-mean-square (RMS) is very frequently used to determine fatigue. However, as RMS is also influenced by muscle force,its effective usage as indicator of fatigue is mainly limited to isometric, constant force tasks.This research develops a simple me-thodto preclude the effect of muscle force, hereby estimates the EMG amplitude response exclusively to fatigue with RMS. Experiment was carried out on the biceps brachiis of 15 subjects (7males, 8 females) during sustained static maximum voluntary contractions (sMVC).Result shows that the sEMG RMS response to fatigue increasesto 21.27% while muscle force decreasing to 50%MVC, which implies that more and more extra effort is needed as muscle fatigue intensifies. It would be promising to use the RMS response exclusively to fatigue as an indicator of muscle fatigue.