Multimodal Wearable Monitoring of Exercise in Isolated, Confined, and Extreme Environments: A Standardized Method

Area of Science:

• Physiology
• Biomedical Engineering
• Space Medicine

Background:

• Assessing exercise in isolated, confined, and extreme (ICE) environments requires standardized, reproducible methods.
• Space and equipment limitations in confined habitats necessitate efficient monitoring techniques for neuromuscular and cardiovascular responses.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a standardized, multimodal protocol for monitoring exercise execution in ICE environments.
• To evaluate the feasibility and reproducibility of this protocol in a simulated confined habitat.

Main Methods:

• Integrated wearable surface electromyography (sEMG), inertial measurement units (IMU), and electrocardiography (ECG) for data acquisition.
• Implemented ten space-efficient exercises during analog missions, synchronizing signals using video-verified repetition boundaries.
• Extracted sEMG amplitude/frequency-domain features and heart rate variability indices for analysis.

Main Results:

• The protocol demonstrated stable real-time data acquisition and reliable repetition segmentation.
• Consistent detection of muscle-specific activation patterns was achieved, with significant exercise-by-muscle interactions observed.
• sEMG mean frequency showed sensitivity to movement strategy, while cardiac measures exhibited limited condition-specific modulation.

Conclusions:

• The proposed protocol offers a practical and reproducible framework for physiological monitoring of exercise in confined settings.
• This method supports future research on exercise quality, training load assessment, and adaptive feedback systems in constrained environments.
• The protocol provides a technical foundation for near-real-time exercise monitoring and feedback in habitats.