July 21, 2015 · android library oss

myolib

myolib is a 3rd party SDK for the "Myo" by Thalmic Labs. The Myo is an arm bracelet with multiple EMG sensors that can measure muscle activity in your forearm (and by extension your hand).

I was very interested in the whole concept and got already to work with a very early Myo device. Future here we come? In the end made only small apps for media control and games like 2048 though.

Thalmic Labs itself sadly wasn't as successful as they hoped to be and their target market of using the Myo for presentations or games just didn't crystallize.

As an unexpected side-effect though, they made a many small contributions to research. The Myo bracelet was one of the cheapest and easiest to use (off-the-shelve) EMG bracelets on the market, which made a lot of small scale research, without lots of funding, feasible.

A little while later I got another chance to work with Myo devices at the computer science chair (mHealth - Uniklinik RWTH Aachen), where I was taking courses.

There was an on-going study into supported training for hand hygiene at hospitals. The Myo was perfect for this scenario, except that data collection was not easy to automate and required a lot of manual script execution as the default SDK for mobile devices did neither support connecting to multiple Myos at once, or support high enough BLE data throughput to record the raw EMG data instead of the discrete recognized gestures.

So as part of my studies I offered to help with that and ventured into the chaotic world of Bluetooth peripherals and Android to create "myolib" 😁.

GitHub - d4rken/myolib: Android Myo library with full data access and support for multiple Myos.
Android Myo library with full data access and support for multiple Myos. - GitHub - d4rken/myolib: Android Myo library with full data access and support for multiple Myos.