Performance Analysis of Electromyogram Signal Compression Sampling in a Wireless Body Area Network

The rapid growth in demand for portable and intelligent hardware has caused tremendous pressure on signal sampling, transfer, and storage resources. As an emerging signal acquisition technology, compressed sensing (CS) has promising application prospects in low-cost wireless sensor networks. To achieve reduced energy consumption and maintain a longer acquisition duration for high sample rate electromyogram (EMG) signals, this paper comprehensively analyzes the compressed sensing method using EMG. A fair comparison is carried out on the performances of 52 ordinary wavelet sparse bases and five widely applied reconstruction algorithms at different compression levels. The experimental results show that the db2 wavelet basis can sparse EMG signals so that the compressed EMG signals are reconstructed properly, thanks to its low percentage root mean square distortion (PRD) values at most compression ratios. In addition, the basis pursuit (BP) reconstruction algorithm can provide a more efficient reconstruction process and better reconstruction performance by comparison. The experiment records and comparative analysis screen out the suitable sparse bases and reconstruction algorithms for EMG signals, acting as prior experiments for further practical applications and also a benchmark for future academic research.