Wearable devices offer a convenient means to monitor biosignals in real time at relatively low cost, and provide continuous monitoring without causing any discomfort. Among signals that contain critical information about human body status, electromyography (EMG) signal is particular useful in monitoring muscle functionality and activity during sport, fitness, or daily life. In particular surface electromyography (sEMG) has proven to be a suitable technique in several health monitoring applications, thanks to its non-invasiveness and ease to use. However, recording EMG signals from multiple channels yields a large amount of data that increases the power consumption of wireless transmission thus reducing the sensor lifetime. Compressed sensing (CS) is a promising data acquisition solution that takes advantage of the signal sparseness in a particular basis to significantly reduce the number of samples needed to reconstruct the signal. As a large variety of algorithms have been developed in recent years with this technique, it is of paramount importance to assess their performance in order to meet the stringent energy constraints imposed in the design of low-power wireless body area networks (WBANs) for sEMG monitoring. The aim of this paper is to present a comprehensive comparative study of computational methods for CS reconstruction of EMG signals, giving some useful guidelines in the design of efficient low-power WBANs. For this purpose, four of the most common reconstruction algorithms used in practical applications have been deeply analyzed and compared both in terms of accuracy and speed, and the sparseness of the signal has been estimated in three different bases. A wide range of experiments are performed on real-world EMG biosignals coming from two different datasets, giving rise to two different independent case studies.
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