Development of a pointing device using surface electromyograms generated by mouth movements

Abstract

A pointing device controlled by mouth movements was developed to accomplish hands-free operations of personal computers (PC) or tablet terminals. The mouth movements were measured with surface electromyograms (EMGs) acquired with four pairs of active electrodes attached on the left and right zygomatic and triangularis muscles. The time-varying average rectified value (ARV) was obtained from the detected EMG signals. The position of the mouse pointer was controlled by the normalized ARVs by vector composition. The distance and angle errors were measured to evaluate the operation accuracy of the pointing device system. The experimental results demonstrated that the subjects could control the mouse pointer with the proposed method at any distance in eight different directions.

Keywords

• pointing device
• mouth movement
• electromyogram
• averaged rectified value