On Board EMG Signal Compression for Portable Devices - A Study

Electromyography signals are used for biomedical applications and clinical diagnosis. This paper presents a system to acquire high quality EMG (electromyography) signal and compress it for high data transfer rate. For acquiring EMG signals we are using off-the-shelf integrated circuit AFE which generates 24 bit data stream output. After acquiring the signal from front end amplifier, the signal is processed (filtration, compression). This is achieved by making use of MSP430 MCU (micro controller). We are using AFE and MSP430 because it is less power consuming, reliable, and both are compatible with each other. The detail of the hardware and software is explained in the further section of the paper. This paper also describes the compression algorithm. Compression is done so that whenever the data is send wirelessly using Bluetooth, Zigbee etc, it requires less bandwidth.