High-density surface electromyography (HD sEMG) is a recent development in the field of neurorehabilitation allowing simultaneous recording of many, spatially differentiated motor unit action potentials (MUAPs). The available literature on studies using HD sEMG is reviewed as a preamble to the experiment. Only one of these is related to prosthetic control and this utilised only a very crude approximation of HD sEMG 31 . Information relating to muscle physiology, electromyography (EMG) and

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... t analysis is also discussed to facilitate understanding of the methods. Using two 64-channel HD electrode-arrays, muscle activation during four different hand movements (and a negative control) were recorded from the extensor digitorum superficialis and flexor digitorum communis of five subjects. Relative wavelet packet energy (RWPE) is the scale-dependent relative energy distribution of a signal at each frequency band after decomposition with the wavelet packet transform and has been previously applied to sEMG with some success 29 . Wavelet packet analysis is carried out offline on the 128-channel recordings and the relative spectral energy density is calculated for each hand movement. Mean values and standard deviations are shown for visualization. Three-way ANOVA is computed for interaction effects between movement, location and firing frequency. Some significant interactions are found (p ≈ 0), but many interactions are not significant suggesting modifications to the experimental design would have to be made for application to prosthetic control. iii 7.4 Mean values and standard deviations for the (negative) control condition shown for Subject 4. Controls were taken between each movement set, thus are representative of the entire experimental duration .