Clarification of Muscle Fatigue Reducing Effect of Walking Assist Device Using Electromyography

This paper presents the fundamental study for understanding and quantifying the muscle fatigue reduction effect of walking assist. We focused on a leg muscle activity to understand how the walking assist system supports healthy people's walking. According to our previous research, we found that a walking assist system (ACSIVE) supports the muscle activity of Gastrocnemius which is one of the triceps surae muscle which generates a driving force for walking forward. Then, we tried to make a basic Electromyography (EMG) map with two indices of EMG such as average RMS and mean frequency to clarify the several muscle conditions. According to the results of EMG indices of wearing and not wearing a walking assist system, we confirmed the possibility to understand the tendency of supported muscle properties and muscle fatigue reduction during walking on a treadmill.