Wireless electromyography technology for fall risk evaluation

The chapter presents a study on an electromyography-based wearable system for fall risk assessment. It has been focused especially on the electrical activity analysis of the user's lower limb muscles in relation to his body movement. For that purpose four wireless electromyography probes (sEMG) have been placed on the Gastrocnemius/Tibialis muscles and an accelerometer-equipped t-shirt has been worn during the Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) and fall events simulations. The results obtained have shown that the simultaneous contraction of the muscles considered appear relevant immediately after the starting of the imbalance condition, when the vertical velocity of the user's body is too low for the commonly used inertial-based pre-fall detection systems. So an sEMG-based platform should be suitable to realize a more efficient platform to prevent the injures due to the fall. The mean lead-time measured, in controlled condition, is more than 750 ms with performance in terms of sensitivity and specificity more than 75%.