An Anti Stimulation Artifacts and M-waves Surface Electromyography Detector with a Short Blanking Time.

A surface electromyography (sEMG) detector, that not only removes stimulation artifacts entirely but also increases the recording time, has been developed in this paper. The sEMG detector consists of an sEMG detection circuit and a stimulation isolator. The sEMG detection circuit employs a stimulus isolate switch (SIS), a blanking (BLK) and non-linear feed-back (NFB) circuit to remove the artifacts and to increase the recording time. In the SIS, the connection between stimulator and stimulation electrodes, along with the stimulation electrodes and the ground are controlled by an opto-isolator, and the connection of instrument amplifier and the recording electrodes are controlled by CMOS-based switches. The mode switches of the BLK and the NFB circuit also employs CMOS-based switches. By an accurate timing adjustment, the voluntary EMG can be recorded during electrical stimulation. Two 6 able-bodied experiments have been performed to test the three anti-artifact sEMG detector: BLK, BLK&SIS, BLK&SIS&NFB. The results indicate that the BLK&SIS&NFB proposed in this work effectively removes stimulus artifacts and M-waves, and has a longer recording time compared with BLK and BLK&SIS circuits.