Recent survey of automated rehabilitation systems using EMG biosensors

Abstract

[Purpose] In this paper, we present a survey of some recently developed techniques in the field of automatic rehabilitation systems assisted by electromyography (EMG) biosensors and their application in physically disabled patients. We also include a discussion about the implementation of several hardware and software models for rehabilitation to make the full process dynamics. [Methods] A systematic search for articles published from 2000 to March 2011 was conducted in the IEEE, Springer Link, Pub Med and ACM digital library databases. The search plan was developed using different terms referring to rehabilitation, EMG sensors and automatic systems as well as we used number of keywords related to the subject of our survey along with their synonyms. The entire survey was performed in the automatic rehabilitation lab (Biomedical Engineering) of the Universiti Malaysia Perils (UniMAP) from December 2010 to March 2011. [Result] A total of 22 articles were analyzed in our study. Of these, 17 articles were about EMG-aided recovery systems developed for the impaired human body. Finally, we conirmed that all of the EMG-supported rehabilitation systems are noninvasive, assisted by a computer or robot and most of them are real-time processes. [Conclusion] Obviously, it is difficult to complete a survey within a single article of all possible EMG- generated rehabilitation systems. However, we expect that the references cited will cover the main theoretical and practical issues, guiding the researcher in interesting research and suggesting promising EMG-aided rehabilitation techniques that have yet to be explored.