The purpose of this study was to reproduce the force in a voluntary contraction via surface electromyography (SEMG) using a systematic muscle model. We measured the isometric voluntary contractile force and SEMG of the human biceps. We examined the effect of the electrode size on SEMG. A pair of electrodes with a diameter of 1 mm was adopted, because they avoided signal interference from the action potentials of other motor units. We added a converter to the muscle model to obtain an artificial action potential that successively drives an excitation-contraction controller and a motor unit. When the force was less than 30% of the maximum force, EMG signals were obtained from a few motor units. The resultant force coincided well with the experimentally observed force with an accuracy of around 90% when an appropriate threshold level was set up in the converter. This method will increase in performance when we can separately detect the SEMG signals from multipoint measurements.

Keywords

Muscle, Model, Electromyography, Numerical Simulation, Excitation-Contraction Coupling

Paper information

Akira ITO, Masami SAITO and Youjiro TAMURA, “Simulation of Force Changes in the Human Biceps Using a Muscle Model Based on Electromyographic Signals”, Journal of Biomechanical Science and Engineering, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2010), pp.18-23 . doi:10.1299/jbse.5.18