Towards Whole Body Fatigue Assessment of Human Movement: A Fatigue-Tracking System Based on Combined sEMG and Accelerometer Signals

Abstract

This paper proposes a method to assess the overall fatigue of human body movement. First of all, according to previous research regarding localized muscular fatigue, a linear relation is assumed between the mean frequency and the muscular working time when the muscle is experiencing fatigue. This assumption is verified with a rigorous statistical analysis. Based on this proven linearity, localized muscular fatigue is simplified as a linear model. Furthermore, localized muscular fatigue is considered a dynamic process and, hence, the localized fatigue levels are tracked by updating the parameters with the most current surface electromyogram (sEMG) measurements. Finally, an overall fatigue level is computed by fusing localized muscular fatigue levels. The developed fatigue-tracking system is evaluated with two fatigue experiments (in which 10 male subjects and seven female subjects participated), including holding self-weight (dip start position training) and lifting weight with one arm (arm curl training).