Design Considerations for a Robust EMG Amplifier

As the field of medicine and healthcare technology is flourishing with each passing day, it has become more important for an electronics system designer to understand the nuances of this field. The technologies like EMG, ECG and EEG are being used extensively in the new designs of healthcare equipments. This paper has been focused mainly on the signal amplification stage for EMG signals. The muscle activity of a human body produces electrical signals called as electromyogram (EMG). These signals have to be processed and amplified for the accurate analysis of the muscle activities. The amplification of EMG signals is of utmost importance in the fields such as prosthetics, rehabilitation, movement analysis etc. This paper gives review of all the packages and techniques that can be used while designing the EMG front-end amplifier. The paper lists and compares several IC packages used for various stages of amplification. Choosing the right components while designing, which is considered one of the most time consuming tasks, becomes much easier with the comparisons and explanations given in this paper. This paper provides researchers a good understanding of EMG signal amplification and its stages in detail. This knowledge will help them develop more powerful, flexible, and efficient applications.