A Technique to Detect Fatigue in the Lower Limbs

As muscles fatigue, their passive and active mechanical properties change increasing the susceptibility of the human body to damage. The state-of-the-art technique for muscle fatigue detection, EMG signals, is cumbersome. This paper presents a technique to detect fatigue by tracking a kinematic parameter of the musculoskeletal system. The method uses the time-history of a single joint angle to detect fatigue in the lower limbs. A sensor is mounted to the knee joint to measure the knee flexion angle. Time delay embedding is used to track the orbit of knee joint motions in a reconstructed phase-space. The reconstructed phase-space allows us to obtain information about other body parts and joints of the lower limb in addition to the knee joint, since they are all connected in an open kinematic chain. Long-time drift in the orbit location and shape in phase-space is quantified and used as a measure of lower limb fatigue. The proposed technique presents a mobile, wireless, and cheap method to assess fatigue that can act as an early warning system for the lower limb.