BACKGROUND It is standard practice to administer a cholinesterase inhibitor (e.g., neostigmine) at the end of a surgical case to reverse suspected effects of neuromuscular blocking agents regardless of whether such residual effects are present. The authors hypothesized that cholinesterase inhibition when given the in absence of neuromuscular blockade (NB) would decrease upper airway dilatory mu...

Wavelets are a powerful tool for biomedical signal processing. Wavelets are used for the processing of signals that are non-stationary and time varying. The EMG signal contains transient signals related to muscle activity. EMG signals have typically many transient components, which are very interesting to isolate and classify according to their physiological significance. Wavelet based denoisin...

Important information gained using dynamic electromyography is to accurately define the muscle action and phase timing within the gait cycle. Human gait relies on selective timing and intensity of appropriate muscle activations for stability, loading and progression over the supporting foot during stance, and further to advance the limb in swing phase. A traditional clinical practice is to low ...

This brief review discusses the methods used to estimate the neural drive to muscles from the surface electromyogram (EMG). Surface EMG has been classically used to infer the neural activation of muscle by associating its amplitude with the number of action potentials discharged by a population of motor neurons. Although this approach is valuable in some applications, the amplitude of the surfa...

Pavlovian fear conditioning is widely used as a laboratory model of associative learning in human and nonhuman species. In this model, an organism is trained to predict an aversive unconditioned stimulus from initially neutral events (conditioned stimuli, CS). In humans, fear memory is typically measured via conditioned autonomic responses or fear-potentiated startle. For the latter, various an...

Essential tremor is a disorder that causes involuntary oscillations in patients both while they are engaged in actions and when maintaining a posture. Such patients face serious difficulties in performing daily living activities such as meal movement. We have been developing an electromyogram (EMG)-controlled exoskeleton to suppress tremors to support the movements of these patients. The proble...

The purpose of the study was to quantify the influence of selected motor unit properties and patterns of activity on amplitude cancellation in the simulated surface electromyogram (EMG). The study involved computer simulations of a motor unit population with physiologically defined recruitment and rate coding characteristics that activated muscle fibers whose potentials were recorded on the ski...

Upper-limb amputation can cause a great deal of functional impairment for patients, particularly for those with amputation at or above the elbow. Our long-term objective is to improve functional outcomes for patients with amputation by integrating a fully implanted electromyographic (EMG) recording system with a wireless telemetry system that communicates with the patient's prosthesis. We belie...

This work focuses on the development of a wearable power-assisted orthosis for nursing care as a health care device to reduce the physical burden on carers. The most important aspect of developing a power-assisted orthosis is that it reflects the orthosis wearer’s intentions, coordinating with the wearer’s voluntary movements. To realize this intention, our work focuses on a torque around a cub...

The present paper describes the influence of cross talk from the abdominal and intercostal muscles on the canine diaphragm electromyogram (EMG). The diaphragm EMG was recorded with bipolar surface electrodes placed on the costal portion of the diaphragm (abdominal side), aligned in the fiber direction, and positioned in a region with a relatively low density of motor end plates. The results ind...