Measuring muscle movements with reflective photosensors

Sammanfattning: Optomyography is the term chosen to name a device containing several reflective photosensors placed in an armband. The device is constructed so that it can measure muscle movements in the arm through the detection of skin structure variation. The aims of this research were to build such a device that is capable of expressing the structure changes in form of intensity changes in light emitting diodes and determine whether it is possible to distinguish different muscle movements. This was accomplished by designing and testing two different circuit schematics for Optomyography that differ depending on whether the outgoing signal is processed or not. The schematics were then used to build two electrical circuits of Optomyography that were tested with several subjects to see if they were functioning. The results show that only the version of Optomyography, which processes the outgoing signal with a high-pass filter and amplifies it, is able to detect muscle movements through skin structure variations. However, further investigation of the device is needed to see if different movements can be distinguished.