Sample entropy analysis of surface EMG for improved muscle activity onset detection against spurious background spikes

Voluntary surface electromyogram (EMG) signal is sometimes contaminated by spurious background spikes of both physiological and extrinsic or accidental origins. A novel method of muscle activity onset detection against such spurious spikes was proposed in this study based primarily on the sample entropy (SampEn) analysis of the surface EMG. The method takes advantage of the nonlinear properties of the SampEn analysis to distinguish voluntary surface EMG signals from spurious background spikes in the complexity domain. To facilitate muscle activity onset detection, the SampEn analysis of surface EMG was first performed to highlight voluntary EMG activity while suppressing spurious background spikes. Then, a SampEn threshold was optimized for muscle activity onset detection. The performance of the proposed method was examined using both semi-synthetic and experimental surface EMG signals. The SampEn based methods effectively reduced the detection error induced by spurious background spikes and achieved improved performance over the methods relying on conventional amplitude thresholding or its extended version in the Teager Kaiser Energy domain.