Exploring State-of-the-Art Machine Learning Methods for Quantifying Exercise-induced Muscle Fatigue

Muscle fatigue is a severe problem for elite athletes, and this is due to the long resting times, which can vary. Various mechanisms can cause muscle fatigue which signifies that the specific muscle has reached its maximum force and cannot continue the task. This thesis was about surveying and exploring state-of-the-art methods and systematically, theoretically, and practically testing the applicability and performance of more recent machine learning methods on an existing EMG to muscle fatigue pipeline. Several challenges within the EMG domain exist, such as inadequate data, finding the most suitable model, and how they should be addressed to achieve reliable prediction. This required approaches for addressing these problems by combining and comparing various state-of-the-art methodologies, such as data augmentation techniques for upsampling, spectrogram methods for signal processing, and transfer learning to gain a reliable prediction by various pre-trained CNN models. The approach during this study was to conduct seven experiments consisting of a classification task that aims to predict muscle fatigue in various stages. These stages are divided into 7 classes from 0-6, and higher classes represent a fatigued muscle. In the tabular part of the experiments, the Decision Tree, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machine (SVM) were trained, and the accuracy was determined. A similar approach was made for the spectrogram part, where the signals were converted to spectrogram images, and with a combination of traditional- and intelligent data augmentation techniques, such as noise and DCGAN, the limited dataset was increased. A comparison between the performance of AlexNet, VGG16, DenseNet, and InceptionV3 pre-trained CNN models was made to predict differences in jump heights. The result was evaluated by implementing baseline classifiers on tabular data and pre-trained CNN model classifiers for CWT and STFT spectrograms with and without data augmentation. The evaluation of various state-of-the-art methodologies for a classification problem showed that DenseNet and VGG16 gave a reliable accuracy of 89.8 % on intelligent data augmented CWT images. The intelligent data augmentation applied on CWT images allows the pre-trained CNN models to learn features that can generalize unseen data. Proving that the combination of state-of-the-art methods can be introduced and address the challenges within the EMG domain