A Portable Wireless sEMG and Inertial Acquisition System for Human Activity Monitoring

This paper presents a low-cost portable wireless system specifically designed to acquire both surface electromyography (sEMG) and accelerometer signals for healthcare applications, sport, and fitness activities. The system, consists of several ultralight wireless sensing nodes that acquire, amplify, digitize, and transmit the sEMG and accelerometer signals to one or more base stations through a 2.4GHz radio link using a custom-made communication protocol designed on top of the IEEE 802.15.4 physical layer. Additionally, the system can be easily configured to capture and process many other biological signals such as the electrocardiographic (ECG) signal. Each base station is connected through a USB link to a control PC running a user interface software for viewing, recording, and analysing the data