Construction of the muscle fatigue evaluation model based on accuracy of power

Abstract

We have developed a rehabilitation support system that assists exercise training in order to reduce the physical load of therapists. Here, we propose a muscle fatigue evaluation method to decide the appropriate momentum for each patient. Many studies on muscle fatigue by electromyography (EMG) have been reported. However, muscle fatigue evaluation by EMG has the disadvantage of complexity of preparation and it can also give patients mental stress. To solve this problem, we propose muscle fatigue evaluation using an accuracy of muscle power. We verified the proposed method on the abduction/adduction of shoulders. We investigated how the accuracy of muscle power changes repeatedly under abduction/adduction while maintaining a constant power in the tangential direction. From the experimental results, we confirm a correlation between the increase in the amplitude of the EMG and an increase in power in the normal direction by a shift in the direction of power from the tangential direction, i.e., the target direction as the muscle fatigue increases.