Mean frequency derived via Hilbert-Huang transform with application to fatigue EMG signal analysis

The mean frequency (MNF) of surface electromyography (EMG) signal is an important index of local muscle fatigue. The purpose of this study is to improve the mean frequency (MNF) estimation. Three methods to estimate the MNF of non-stationary EMG are compared. A novel approach based on Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT), which comprises the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and Hilbert transform, is proposed to estimate the mean frequency of non-stationary signal. The performance of this method is compared with the two existing methods, i.e. autoregressive (AR) spectrum estimation and wavelet transform method. It is observed that our method shows low variability in terms of robustness to the length of the analysis window. The time-varying characteristic of the proposed approach also enables us to accommodate other non-stationary biomedical data analysis.