[Progress in research and application of respiratory surface electromyography in respiratory and critical care...

Continuous monitoring of respiratory drive plays an important role in guiding mechanical ventilation and assessing changes in disease, but respiratory drive cannot be measured directly. Respiratory and critical care practitioners often monitor respiratory effort to reflect respiratory drive, such as esophageal pressure and esophageal diaphragm electrical activity, but these methods are limited by their invasive nature, high technical requirements, and high cost. Esophageal diaphragmatic electromyography only monitors the activity level of the diaphragm and ignores other respiratory muscles, especially in patients who breathe forcefully and cannot truly reflect the patient's inspiratory effort. As a result, the monitoring of esophageal pressure and esophageal diaphragmatic electromyography activity are limited in clinical application. Surface electromyography (sEMG) of respiratory muscles is a non-invasive method for monitoring respiratory electromyographic activity that can be used to monitor the activity levels of all respiratory muscles and evaluate their functional status. This paper summarized the progress of sEMG in evaluating dyspnea, predicting acute exacerbations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diagnosing bronchial asthma, guiding mechanical ventilation, and formulating respiratory muscle training programs to provide a new method of assessing respiratory effort.