Thesis Project Form

Abnormalities in muscles activations are common symptoms of many neurological disorders, such as Stroke, Multiple Sclerosis (MS), Cerebral Palsy (CP) and Spinal-Cord Injury (SCI), resulting in uncorrected activation patterns that may additionally hamper an already unstable condition. Together with the traditional approaches in treating muscles abnormalities (i.e. drug administration or botulinum toxin injection), Myoelectric control systems (MCSs) are designed to directly take EMG-signals from patients’ bodies as control signals for the rehabilitation intervention. Moreover, the use of EMG-signals aims at recovering correct muscles activations patterns, preventing injuries or training patients after surgery and, also, enables to create engaging rehabilitation exercises to increase the patient motivation. This project aims at assessing the potential of a myoelectric interface to reduce abnormalities in muscles activations.

The proposed thesis has 2 main aims:
- Aim 1: Development of both a low-cost technology enabling the collection of EMG data and an interface enabling the signal processing and mapping into a variety of control tasks, including the control of video games.
- Aim 2: Testing the myoelectric control system. A first evaluation will be performed with healthy participants to assess the effectiveness of the interface and control systems, then a second evaluation will be performed with spinal cord injury survivors

The student will learn to:
1. Program a Microcontroller for signals acquisition.
2. Process and Analyze EMG signals.
3. Develop the control of an external device based on muscles signals.
4. Improve the knowledge of C#/MATLAB and statistical analysis.