Effect Analysis of Wearing an Lumbar Exoskeleton on Coordinated Activities of the Low Back Muscles Using sEMG Topographic Maps

This study used the surface electromyography (sEMG) topographic map based on multi-channel electrodes from low back muscles to analyze the effects. Thirteen subjects conducted two tasks, namely lifting and holding a 20kg-weight box. For each task, three different trials, not wearing exoskeleton (NoExo), wearing exoskeleton but power-off (OffExo), and wearing exoskeleton and power-on (OnExo), were randomly conducted. Root-mean-square (RMS) and median-frequency (MDF) topographic maps of the recorded sEMG were constructed. Three parameters, average pixel values, distribution of center of gravity (CoG), and entropy, were extracted from the maps to assess the muscle coordinated activities. In the lifting task, results showed the average pixel values of RMS maps for the NoExo trial were lower than those for the OffExo trial ( $\text{p} $ 0.05). The distribution of CoG showed a significant difference between NoExo and OnExo trials ( $\text{p}
Source: IEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering - Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research