aka Effect of Finger-Related Tasks on the Performance of Finger Muscles

Presentation slides

Detailed project report

Abstract

Motivation
Our fingers play a very important role in accomplishing many important daily tasks. The use of our fingers has become critical with advances in technology, especially personal computers and mobile smartphones. These repetitive activities stress our fingers, and their long-term impact is unknown. This experiment aims to determine the effect of daily activities on our fingers.

Goal
The objective of this experiment is to determine if writing, texting or typing causes most fatigue to finger muscles.

Hypothesis
The hypothesis is that if the duration of the task is increased, writing will cause the most finger muscle fatigue.

Materials and Procedure
Each of four subjects does all three activities of writing (with a pencil and paper), typing (with a Dell keyboard), and texting (with an iPhone SE) three times for trials, with each activity lasting for 10 minutes. When the subject is doing a specific activity, electrodes and Myoware muscle sensors are placed on the skin above two muscle groups: the abductor pollicis brevis (APB) and the flexor digitorum superficialis (FDS), that control the fingers. The sensors send the electrical muscle activity as a time series through an Arduino to be stored in a computer. The recorded data is then filtered and processed to extract magnitude and frequency information of the time varying signal to determine the amount of fatigue for the corresponding muscle, subject, and trial. The results are averaged over three trials.

Results
Results on four subjects demonstrate that the writing task causes the greatest number of cases with maximum fatigue. The FDS muscle group is more fatigued than the APB group. Also, writing and typing tasks cause fatigue in male subjects, while writing and texting tires female subjects.

Conclusion
The results confirm the hypothesis. It appears that use of gadgets tires our fingers less than the traditional task of writing. This investigation can be extended to more subjects to improve the accuracy of the results. This research can also be applied to study fatigue with computer mouse use and fatigue in other muscles such as back muscles.