Many people suffer physically from working with computers. Common problems are aches and pain in the neck and shoulder region and disorders in the hands or the wrists. The European project PROCID aimed at providing a scientific base for prevention measures against such problems.
A key element in medical and physiological studies of such issues is the analysis of electromyograms (EMG), i.e., the recordings of the electrical signals that are associated with all muscle activity. Ideally, the medical researcher would like to see the activation pattern of each individual motor unit (muscle fibre group). However, the measured electrical signal is the superposition of the signals from a large number of such of motor units, the 'signature' of which is not known a priori and may even change over time. The desired decomposition of the measured signal is a challenging signal processing task.
In this project, the Signal Processing Lab of ETHZ (Institut for für Signal- und Informationsverarbeitung, ISI) worked closely together with the Institute of Hygiene and Applied Physiology of ETHZ-the former on measurement equipment and signal processing, the latter on physiological and medical research. Significant progress was made in both areas. In contrast to earlier work at ISI in this area, the effort in this project focussed on the long-term decomposition of EMG signals. Improvements were actually obtained in most parts of the signal processing chain, including clustering, classification, segmentation etc. A key element in that work was the use of Wavelet representations.
Further information:
http://www.isi.ee.ethz.ch/research/research_topics/biomedsp/index.en.htmlhttp://www.lindholmen.se
