An Intelligent Pixelated Electrode Array for High Density Surface Electromyography Sensors

Surface electromyography (sEMG) sensor is a non- invasive diagnostic tool for identifying muscle diseases which is also utilized in portable smart devices to recognize body mass compositions. In this article, we propose a novel electrode array which composes of tiny electrodes, mimicking the arrangement of High Density Surface EMG, that can modulate electrode size and leverage natural filtering property of electrodes to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio. The arrangement is similar to the arrangement of image pixels in digital screen and hence called ’pixelated’. The proposed scheme is very adaptive to varied skin composition as well as body location and hence behaves like an intelligent agent. While determining the ideal electrode layout, the suggested concept significantly reduces the signal sample duration and is able to avoid additional computational overhead once the optimal arrangement is identified. Moreover, it offers a substantial advantage over traditional signal processing techniques, which need constant processing to filter out noise and improve the intelligent signal with digital filters and transceiver amplifiers. Because of truncated processing cost, the proposed array is suitable for wearable devices driven with low- power embedded microcontrollers, where high computational requirement often proves to be prohibitive.