Muscle fatigue assessment through electrodermal activity analysis during isometric contraction

We studied the effects of muscle fatigue on the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) dynamics. Specifically, we monitored the electrodermal activity (EDA) on 32 healthy subjects performing isometric biceps contraction. As assessed by means of an electromyography (EMG) analysis, 15 subjects showed muscle fatigue and 17 did not. EDA signals were analyzed using the recently proposed cvxEDA model in order to decompose them into their phasic and tonic components and extract effective features to study ANS dynamics. A statistical comparison between the two groups of subjects was performed. Results revealed that relevant phasic EDA features significantly increased in the fatigued group. Moreover, a pattern recognition system was applied to the EDA dataset in order to automatically discriminate between fatigued and non-fatigued subjects. The proposed leave-one-subject-out KNN classifier showed an accuracy of 75.69%. These results suggest the use of EDA as correlate of muscle fatigue, providing integrative information to the standard indices extracted from the EMG signals.