Development of functional electrical stimulator with movement feedback parameter for muscle activation level detection / Nazurah Ahmad Termimi

Functional electrical stimulation (FES) was widely used in rehabilitation for restoring body function by stimulating the muscle with certain amount of current. An alternative of feedback parameter for muscle activation detection was studied. A movement feedback parameter was chosen to detect musc...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Nazurah, Ahmad Termimi
Format: Thesis
Published: 2012
Subjects:
Online Access:http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/7621/
http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/7621/1/nazurah.pdf
Description
Summary:Functional electrical stimulation (FES) was widely used in rehabilitation for restoring body function by stimulating the muscle with certain amount of current. An alternative of feedback parameter for muscle activation detection was studied. A movement feedback parameter was chosen to detect muscle activation. Two flexible bend sensors were used to detect muscle movement. In this study, consists of three parts. First part, a stimulator would be developed. Second part, flexible bend sensor embedded to the stimulator for muscle movement detection. Third part, stimulator supplied current through stimulation electrodes for muscle activation and muscle movement detected by flexible bend sensor. Flexible bend sensors were undergo a voluntary and non-voluntary test to observed the voltage output change with the muscle activation relationship. For voluntary test, there are two separate sessions. The first session, a subject was asked to cycle for 20 minutes. For every five minutes, the first three reading displayed on screen will be recorded. The second session, subject also need to do cycling but data recording was different. By using sampling time of five seconds, an output voltage reading from muscle activation was recorded. For non-voluntary test, current was supplied to vastus medialis muscle and the muscle contraction and relaxation were recorded. In conclusion, muscle activation can be detected by muscle movement sensed by flexible bend sensor. Based on the basic circuit of flexible bend sensor which is voltage divider, when muscle contracted, bending angle and resistance increased, voltage output was low. When muscle relaxes, bending angle ad resistance decreased and voltage output was high.