Multimodal Wearable Ultrasound + EMG

We are interested in developing multimodal wearable systems combining ultrasound and electromyography (EMG) for assisted motor rehabilitation.

EMG provides information about electrical muscle activation, while wearable ultrasound can directly observe deeper mechanical phenomena such as muscle contraction, deformation, thickness changes and movement of underlying anatomical structures. Their combination therefore offers a richer view of neuromuscular function than either modality alone.

The objective is to develop wearable systems capable of monitoring rehabilitation exercises continuously and objectively, both in the clinic and during unsupervised home rehabilitation. Embedded intelligence could quantify movement quality, detect compensatory strategies, estimate recovery progress, and provide personalized real-time feedback to patients or therapists.

Potential directions include:

• upper- and lower-limb rehabilitation

• post-stroke motor recovery

• musculoskeletal rehabilitation

• monitoring of muscle recruitment and coordination

• exercise-quality and range-of-motion assessment

• personalized rehabilitation and adaptive feedback

• wearable edge AI for real-time movement interpretation

• longitudinal monitoring outside the clinic

Our contribution would cover wearable ultrasound and EMG electronics, sensor integration, embedded processing, multimodal machine learning and edge-AI deployment.

We are looking for partners in rehabilitation medicine, physiotherapy, biomechanics, clinical validation, wearable sensors, robotics and assistive technologies to co-design clinically relevant use cases and validate the technology in realistic rehabilitation pathways.

Selected Examples of Our Work:

- WULPUS: ultra-low-power wearable ultrasound system, demonstrating continuous sensing under stringent power budgets (https://github.com/pulp-bio/wulpus)

- TinyProbe, wearable multimodal ultrasound (A/B/M/Doppler mode), wireless and battery operated (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10750870)

- EMG foundation model on the edge (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/11701516)

- wearable ultrasound for VR interaction (https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17741)

- wearable ultrasound and EMG for hand kinematics (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/11327564)