A novel biomedical application for the Myo gesture control armband

Abstract

The Myo gesture control armband, by Thalmic Labs, allows taking control of several digital technologies from a distance. The Myo uses Electromyography (EMG) sensors to read electrical activity in muscles. Departing from this fact, in this paper we focus on the Myo as a biomedical equipment that could be used for medical purposes. Limited contribution has been made by Myo developers in this area. To prove this, we used the Myo armband to continuously flip slides of a PowerPoint presentation using two arm data-sets; 6 normal arms and 1 injured arm. The energy and rms performances of the normal and injured arms were compared at the first 10 seconds and after 40 and 80 seconds. For the normal arms flipping the presentation, the energy and rms values remained nearly the same (for the energy; 23 dB at 10s to 21 dB at 80s and for rms; 16 dB at 10s to 14.5 dB at 80s). However, for the injured arm the performance deteriorated as time elapsed (for the energy; 22 dB at 10s to 15 dB at 80s and for rms; 15 dB at 10s to 10.5 dB at 80s), as a result that the injured muscles were getting tired and their electrical activity was reduced.