sEMG based quantitative assessment of acupuncture on Bells palsy: an experimental study

Acupuncture is a traditional Chinese therapeutic method, recognized by western medicine as an important complementary therapy. However, the efficacy assessment of this traditional intervention has been mainly empirical rather than scientific. In this paper, we propose a surface electromyography (sEMG) based approach for quantitative assessment of acupuncture on Bell’s palsy. The assessment is made by comparing the muscle activities of healthy with diseased ones. A feature-vector of four individual sEMG features is introduced for more comprehensive representation of muscle activity. A clustering technique is then proposed to calculate quantitative differences between the muscle activities of the healthy and diseased sides. A regressive model is also proposed to predict the recovery trend of a patient based on the quantitative assessments during his/her clinical acupuncture history. As reported in the paper, a total of 20 selected Bell’s palsy patients have participated in the extensive experiments that were conducted to verify the performance of the proposed method