A Co-Located MMG-FES Wearable Interface for Action-Updated State-Gated Stimulation

Abstract

Functional electrical stimulation (FES) assists movement, but fixed schedules cannot track how a repeatedly activated muscle changes, and surface electromyography (EMG) near the stimulation electrodes is often obscured by artifacts. Prior work recorded mechanomyography (MMG) passively during closed-loop FES cycling and estimated FES-induced fatigue or predicted fatigue for FES control, without gating stimulation with stimulated-site MMG. In this study, we present VG-FES, a wearable module co-locating microphone-based MMG, programmable charge-balanced biphasic stimulation, and embedded state-gated control at one on-skin thigh site. After each action, we compare rectus femoris (RF) mean power frequency (MPF) with an early-session baseline of the same direction, giving a relative state. A threshold on its window means enables fixed-duration bursts separated by rest periods. During onboard stimulation, MMG remained recordable, whereas near-site EMG was artifact-dominated. Under prolonged external stimulation, cycle-wise MMG tracked an independent local-pressure reference (Spearman rho = 0.968). In leave-one-session-out evaluation on 2284 squat actions (11 sessions, eight participants), MMG-based action segmentation reached an event-detection F1 of 0.923 and direction classification a balanced accuracy of 0.925. Online, over 15.69 min of self-paced squats, one participant received four bursts while MMG acquisition and action monitoring continued. Mechanical feedback from the stimulated site offers wearable FES and assistive robotics a per-action basis for state-gated stimulation.