Design and Study of a Multi-Channel Electrical Muscle Stimulation Toolkit for Human Augmentation

“multi-ems” is a multi-channel electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) toolkit for human augmentation purposes. The prototype toolkit was designed and used for Human Augmentation Summer School 2017. One board has 4 output channels. However, the channels can be easily increased by using multiple boards.

boardinfo

Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS) has attracted many users and researchers to apply the technique for various usages. However, EMS products for research purpose are limited and open source hardware still has limitations. We present a multi-channel EMS toolkit for researchers and designers to develop their original ideas. The toolkit was designed to have isolated multiple channels to be manipulated simultaneously, which allows simultaneous control of multiple body parts and multiple users. We organized a workshop with a theme of human augmentation, where EMS was not compelled to use. As a result, several groups found interest in using EMS for their development, and participants successfully used our toolkit for their presentation. We found that multi-channel EMS has a significant demand for human augmentation purposes.

toolkit

GitHub

https://github.com/rkmtlab/multi-ems

Publications

  • Michinari Kono, Yoshio Ishiguro, Takashi Miyaki, and Jun Rekimoto. 2018. Design and Study of a Multi-Channel Electrical Muscle Stimulation Toolkit for Human Augmentation. In Proceedings of the 9th Augmented Human International Conference (AH ’18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 11, 8 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3174910.3174913 (Peer Review)