Fatigue compensation during FES using surface EMG

Muscle fatigue limits the effectiveness of FES when applied to regain functional movements in spinal cord injured (SCI) individuals. The stimulation intensity must be manually increased to provide more force output to compensate for the decreasing muscle force due to fatigue. An artificial neural network (ANN) system was designed to compensate for muscle fatigue during functional electrical stimulation (FES) by maintaining a constant joint angle. Surface electromyography signals (EMG) from electrically stimulated muscles were used to determine when to increase the stimulation intensity when the muscle's output started to drop. In two separate experiments on able-bodied subjects seated in hard back chairs, electrical stimulation was continuously applied to fatigue either the biceps (during elbow flexion) or the quadriceps muscle (during leg extension) while recording the surface EMG. An ANN system was created using processed surface EMG as the input, and a discrete fatigue compensation control signal, indicating when to increase the stimulation current, as the output. In order to provide training examples and test the systems' performance, the stimulation current amplitude was manually increased to maintain constant joint angles. Manual stimulation amplitude increases were required upon observing a significant decrease in the joint angle. The goal of the ANN system was to generate fatigue compensation control signals in an attempt to maintain a constant joint angle. On average, the systems could correctly predict 78.5% of the instances at which a stimulation increase was required to maintain the joint angle. The performance of these ANN systems demonstrates the feasibility of using surface EMG feedback in an FES control system.