Smart Armband with Graphene Textile Electrodes for EMG-based Muscle Fatigue Monitoring

We report the successful acquisition of surface electromyography (sEMG) signals from an intelligent armband and its application in localized muscle fatigue monitoring with a costume-designed, small-scale front-end readout circuitry. The correlation coefficient of the graphene-based textile electrodes in benchmarking against Ag/AgCl electrodes is recorded to be similar to 97%. SNR values for Ag/AgCl and graphene textile electrodes were 15.9 dB and 14.3 dB, respectively. The muscle fatigue experiment was an isometric contraction conducted on the right biceps brachii of subjects. The recorded signal showed indications of localized muscle fatigue with an apparent increase in the total band energy and decreased instantaneous median frequency (IMF) with linear regression slopes of 0.0082 mV(2)/s and -0.19 Hz/s, respectively. Recorded promising results show that graphene textiles can be applied as practical sensing elements for wearable sEMG acquisition and enable novel applications such as muscle fatigue monitoring.