Application of Singular Spectrum-based Change-point Analysis to EMG Event Detection

• Main Author: Vaisman, Lev
• Other Authors: Popovic, Milos R.
• Format: Others
• Language: en_ca
• Published: 2008
• Subjects: EMG signal processing; change-point detection; singular spectrum analysis-based detection; 0541
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/17234

Electromyogram (EMG) is an established tool to study operation of neuromuscular systems. In analysing EMG signals, accurate detection of the movement-related events in the signal is frequently necessary. I explored the application of change-point detection algorithm proposed by Moskvina et. al., 2003 to EMG event detection, and evaluated the technique’s performance comparing it to two common threshold-based event detection methods and to the visual estimates of the EMG events performed by trained practitioners in the field. The algorithm was implemented in MATLAB and applied to EMG segments recorded from wrist and trunk muscles. The quality and frequency of successful detection were assessed for all methods, using the average visual estimate as the baseline, against which techniques were evaluated. The application showed that the change-point detection can successfully locate multiple changes in the EMG signal, but the maximum value of the detection statistic did not always identify the muscle activation onset.