A PC-based workstation for real-time acquisition, processing, and display of electromyogram signals

A system for real-time acquisition, processing, display, and logging of multiple channels of the EMG waveform has been described. By designing this system around the configuration of a standard PC, custom hardware was avoided. Similarly, software was designed in a higher-level language (C), simplifying the programming burden and minimizing custom software development. Components of the software are available off the shelf. The computational capacity of generic PCs facilitates very high rates of numeric calculation, as required by some advanced EMG amplitude estimation algorithms. Computational capacity is expected to increase, facilitating ever more numerically intensive EMG algorithms that are likely to be developed in the future. The system described here has been used in the development of an adaptive window EMG amplitude-estimation algorithm. The system is extensible and can be altered for many uses related to EMG and biosignal processing.