MULTIFRACTAL ANALYSIS OF EMG FOR CLASSIFICATION AND PROGRESSIVE ASSESSMENT OF BICEPS BRACHII MUSCLE STRENGTH

The proposed research demonstrates an attempt to introduce a systematic procedure for studying the multifractal dynamics of biceps brachii muscle actions during light exercises. The intrinsic patterns in the Surface Electromyogram (sEMG) signals were extracted by fruitfully exploiting the Multifractal features of the signal. The Multifractal features are derived from the multifractal singularity spectrum of the EMG signals. This multifractal feature vector could be utilized for signal characterization, which was successfully extended for the classification of EMG signals. Experimental verification has been done to validate the feature extraction and classification algorithm proposed in this article. A pilot study was conducted on signals from the Physionet database, which was then extended to a medium database developed with biceps brachii EMG signals of 32 healthy male subjects. From this study, we could validate that the Multifractal features fit as a differentiating multi-feature set and also for the progressive assessment of EMG signals of different classes. The observations of the proposed method revealed that the strength of multifractality and area under the spectrum increase as a result of fast movements of the forearm or increases in muscle fatigue. The classification is performed using well-recognized supervised classification algorithms such as k-Nearest Neighbor and Support Vector Machine (SVM) Classifiers. The performance analysis of the classifiers are studied on various measures such as Accuracy, Precision, Recall, F1 score. The statistical significance analysis of the feature vector was carried out by one-way ANOVA test.