A Mathematical Model of Surface Electromyographic Measurements

This article describes a detailed, analytical model of the physiological processes involved in the generation and measurement of single muscle fiber action potentials. The model comprises the propagation of an intracellular action potential along a muscle fiber, the diffusion of the resulting electric field throughout the surrounding biological tissues, and the influence of the measurement system. It has been proposed previously; here, an alternative formulation of some parts of the model is proposed and several mathematical properties of the model are remarked that are of interest for a numerical implementation. Results of a numerical simulation highlight the model’s capability to reproduce many physiological effects observed in experimental measurements, and to produce realistic test data that may be useful for the validation of signal processing algorithms.