Millions suffer each year from muscle deficiency resulting from various medical conditions such as muscular dystrophy, nerve damage, stroke, neurapraxia, spinal cord injury and more. The Exo-Arm capstone project seeks to demonstrate the potential of Electromyography (EMG) based orthotic devices for strength enhancement and rehabilitation. For this capstone project an EMG based exoskeleton arm was designed and fabricated. This device is designed to be attached to a user's arm and respond directly to the signal from the user's muscles. Once a user flexes their biceps, the skin electrodes detect the change in voltage and the EMG signal is sent to an Arduino nano. The Arduino microcontroller takes this raw signal and runs it through a smoothing algorithm and returns a clean signal. Once the clean signal passes a given threshold, a signal is sent to the motor controller which activates the electric motor.
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