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1 Center for Sensory-Motor Interaction, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark
2 Department of Health Science and Technology, Aalborg University, (SMI), Aalborg, Denmark; Biomedical Engineering Department, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, Indiana, United States
3 Department of Medical Engineering and Neuroprosthelics, Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering, St. Ingbert, Germany; Department of Microsystems Engineering-IMTEK, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Ghana
4 Department of Medical Engineering and Neuroprosthelics, Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering, St. Ingbert, Germany
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: df{at}hst.aau.dk.
It is currently not possible to record electromyographic (EMG) signals from many locations concurrently inside the muscle in a single wire electrode system. We developed a thin-film wire electrode system for multi-channel intramuscular EMG recordings. The system was fabricated using a micromachining process, with a silicon wafer as production platform for polyimide-based electrodes. In the current prototype, the flexible polymer structure is 220-µm wide, 10-µm thick, 1.5-cm long, and has 8 circular Platinum/Platinum Chloride (Pt/PtCl) recording sites of 40-µm diameter distributed along the front and back surfaces with 1500-µm inter-site spacing. The system prototype was tested in 6 experiments where the electrode was implanted into the medial head of the gastrocnemius muscle of rabbits, perpendicular to the pennation angle of the muscle fibers. Asynchronous motor unit activity was induced by eliciting the withdrawal reflex or sequential crushes of the sciatic nerve using a pair of forceps. Sixty-seven motor units were identified from these recordings. In the bandwidth 200 Hz - 5 kHz, the peak-to-peak amplitude of the action potentials of the detected motor units was 75 ± 12 µV and the root mean square of the noise was 1.6 ± 0.4 µV. The noise level and amplitude of the action potentials were similar for measures separated by up to 40 min. The experimental tests demonstrated that thin-film is a promising technology for a new type of flexible-wire intramuscular EMG recording system with multiple detection sites.
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R. Merletti and D. Farina Analysis of intramuscular electromyogram signals Phil Trans R Soc A, January 28, 2009; 367(1887): 357 - 368. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] |
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