This study investigated the effect of prolonged walking with load carriage on body posture, muscle fatigue, heart rate and blood pressure of the tested subjects. Ten healthy volunteers performed 30 min walking trials on treadmill (speed=1.1 m/s) with different backpack loads [0% body weight (BW), 10%BW, 15%BW and 20%BW]. The change of body posture, muscle fatigue, heart rate and blood pressure before and after walking and the recovery of muscle fatigue during the rest time (0, 5, 10 and 15 min) were collected using the Bortec AMT-8 and the NDI Optotrak Certus. Results showed that the forward trunk and head angle, muscle fatigue, heart rate and blood pressure increased with the increasing backpack loads and bearing time. With the 20%BW load, the forward angle, muscle fatigue and systolic pressure were significantly higher than with lighter weights. No significantly increased heart rate and diastolic pressure were found. Decreased muscle fatigue was found after removing the backpack in each load trial. But the recovery of the person with 20%BW load was slower than that of 0%BW,10%BW and 15%BW. These findings indicated that the upper limit of backpack loads for college-aged students should be between 15% BW and 20%BW according to muscle fatigue and forward angle. It is suggested that backpack loads should be restricted to no more than 15%BW for walks of up to 30 min duration to avoid irreversible muscle fatigue.
The present study was carried out with the surface electromyography signal of subjects during the time when subjects did the exercises of the 6 core stability trainings. We analyzed the different activity level of surface electromyography signal, and finally got various fatigue states of muscles in different exercises. Thirty subjects completed exercises of 6 core stability trainings, which were prone bridge, supine bridge, unilateral bridge (divided into two trainings,i.e. the left and right sides alternatively) and bird-dog (divided into two trainings,i.e. the left and right sides alternatively), respectively. Each exercise was held on for 1 minute and 2 minutes were given to relax between two exercises in this test. We measured both left and right sides of the body’s muscles, which included erector spina, external oblique, rectus abdominis, rectus femoris, biceps femoris, anterior tibial and gastrocnemius muscles. We adopted the frequency domain characteristic value of the surface electromyography signal,i.e. median frequency slope to analyze the muscle fatigue in this study. In the present paper, the results exhibit different fatigue degrees of the above muscles during the time when they did the core stability rehabilitation exercises. It could be concluded that supine bridge and unilateral bridge can cause more fatigue on erector spina muscle, prone bridge caused Gastrocnemius muscle much fatigue and there were statistical significant differences (P<0.05) between prone bridge and other five rehabilitation exercises in the degree of rectus abdominis muscle fatigue. There were no statistical significant differences (P>0.05) between all the left and right sides of the same-named muscles in the median frequency slope during all the exercises of the six core stability trainings,i.e. the degree which the various kinds of rehabilitation exercises effected the left and right side of the same-named muscle had no statistical significant difference (P>0.05). In this research, the conclusion presents quantized guidelines on the effects of core stability trainings on different muscles.
The purpose of this study is to compare the differences among neck muscle fatigue evaluation algorithms and to find a more effective algorithm which can provide a human factor quantitative evaluation method for neck muscle fatigue during bending over the desk. We collected surface electromyography signal of sternocleidomastoid muscle of 15 subjects using wireless physiotherapy Bio-Radio when they bent over the desk using memory pillows for 12 minutes. Five algorithms including mean power frequency, spectral moments ratio, discrete wavelet transform, fuzzy approximation entropy and the complexity algorithms were used to calculate the corresponding muscle fatigue index. The least squares method was used to calculate the corresponding coefficient of determination R2 and slope k of the linear regression of the muscle fatigue metric. The coefficient of determination R2 evaluates anti-interference ability of algorithms. The maximum vertical distance Lmax which is obtained by the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for the slopes k evaluates the ability to distinguish fatigue of algorithms. The results indicate that in the aspect of anti-interference ability, the fuzzy approximation entropy has the largest R2 when using memory pillows with different heights. When the fuzzy approximate entropy is compared with average power frequency or the discrete wavelet transform, the differences are significant (P < 0.05). In terms of distinguishing the degree of fatigue, the approximate entropy is still the largest, with a maximum of 0.496 7. Fuzzy approximation entropy is superior to other algorithms in ability of anti-interference and distinguishing fatigue. Therefore, fuzzy approximation entropy can be used as a better evaluation algorithm in the evaluation of cervical muscle fatigue.
Muscle fatigue has widespread application in the field of rehabilitation medicine. The paper studies the muscle fatigue using surface electromyogram (sEMG) in the background of rehabilitation training system. The sEMG and ventilatory threshold of vastus lateralis, rectus femoris and erector spinae are collected synchronously and the electromyogram fatigue threshold (EMGFT) of different sEMG was analyzed by increasing load cycling experiments of 10 healthy subjects. This paper also analyzes the effect of isotonic and isometric contraction on EMGFT. Results showed that the appeared time of EMGFT was earlier than that of ventilatory threshold in the incremental load cycling. While the differences were subtle and EMGFT was verified to be effective. EMGFT has been proven effective for different muscle contraction by comparing the EMGFT of vastus lateralis and erector spinae. EMGFT could be used to keep muscle injuries from overtraining in the process of rehabilitation. Therefore, EMGFT has a great significance for femoral shaft fractures’s fatigue monitoring in rehabilitation training.