Maximum Red Team 2021
Neural Prosthetic
Most individuals are born with two functional hands and wrists and learn to control these body parts during their early devel-opment. Sadly some people lose these extremities over the course of their lifetime through amputation or acci-dents.Amputee Coalition reports that as of2016, the United States had 2.1 Million amputees, with 158 thousand new ampu-tations taking place each year. This has prompted a tremendous increase in the research and development of prosthetics, espe-cially prosthetics controlled by myoelectricity, electricity pro-duced by muscles in the body. The process of recording myoe-lectricity by attaching electrodes onto the surface of the muscle is called surface Electromyography (sEMG). Our team aims to build a signal processing pipeline that will record sEMG signals from a person’s forearm in real time and translate them into two degrees of freedom (DoF) of the wrist using software. The two DoF are a combination of radial/ulnar deviation and flex-ion/extension movements of the wrist. We hope our work on this project will contribute towards the research being done to produce more technologically advanced and more economically affordable prosthetics. It is not within the scope of this project to create a fitted prosthetic.
Related Tech Notes
- Analog Conditioning for Bioelectric Signals by Monique Dubois
- Quick Introduction to Neural Networks by Max Gudwin
- Surveying the Art: Myoelectric Prosthetics by Sean Moushegian
- Introduction to sEMG Signals by Katya Thorup
Project Poster
