I spent most of my effort this week on the EMG sensor settings and testing. I connected up the circuits and solder wirings that are necessary. I was studying and reading different EMG prosthetics trials that have been done to see different way they gather the EMG information from different parts. Since our targeted muscle is the shoulder, there hasn’t been much studies in that so i have to do some research on the physiology of the shoulder muscles. I started with trying to control the signals with arm flexor muscles which are the most typical trial examples to ensure that the circuit works correctly. Then, I move on to trying out shoulder control movement. In the beginning, I came across the problem of finding the right spots to find the stable point on the shoulder as there is no documentation or examples online that use the muscle. Thus, I have to study more about the muscles and try to find the right grounding position through trial and error. Wendy helped me with testing trials to try with different subjects as well and we found two potential spots would be good for shoulder movement sensing. The details are reported in the Team’s status report. Meanwhile, I also looked into connecting up the arduino to the python so that after the EMG testing is done, we can integrate this to Wendy’s front end event controls. I’m planning to use either pyfirmata, or pyserial. We are going to use the port serial for data transmission to the computer first before moving into using the bluetooth module. I am a little bit off from what I planned to accomplish this week due to the challenges that occured with EMG. But now I got a satisfying result and will move onto my next steps as mentioned above.
