A COMPUTATIONAL APPROACH FOR EARLY STAGE IDENTIFICATION OF LOWER LIMB MUSCLE ABNORMALITIES IN HUMANS

ABSTRACT The human skeletal musclehas a complex hierarchical organization comprising ofseveral force producing muscle fibres arranged within a connective tissue network, whichcan contract and relax to cause motion or movement of the limbs [1]. This contraction and relaxation of skeletal muscles fibresresults in walking or conduct of locomotion activities in the lower limbs. Due to frequent travelling in the tough hilly areas, with age may cause the hampering of activities of daily living (ADL) tasks and restriction of movement of people living in these regions resulting from severe pain in the lower limbs. Hence, there is intensive potent need to develop an interactive GUI which will be helpful to doctor(s) and as well as to scientist(s) working in the field of biomechanics and rehabilitation. In this paper, an attempt has been made to develop an interactive GUI by employingmyoelectric signals from significant lower limb muscles corresponding to the specific activity or task performance in an individual. The data is procured from freely available online sources such as University of California Irvine (UCI), department laboratories for the different population age groups for both the genders. This data would comprise of standard and abnormal patterns of activity while performing ADL tasks, which could be further analysed employing signal processing tools post conditioning with the help of MATLAB in the GUI software.These processed bioelectric signals are sent to an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to train the software for detection of abnormalities in EMG signals of the lower extremity muscles. Post-processing, information from the ANN would be available in the GUI for the diagnosis or clinical interpretation by the physicians about the type, frequency and level of abnormality in selected muscles. This would help remove stress on the medical fraternity for performing routine diagnosis due to high patient load in the hospitals of our country