Electromyography and kinematics data of the hand in activities of daily living with special interest for ergonomics

This work presents a dataset of human hand kinematics and forearm muscle activation collected during the performance of a wide variety of activities of daily living (ADLs), with tagged characteristics of products and tasks. A total of 26 participants performed 161 ADLs selected to be representative of common elementary tasks, grasp types, product orientations and performance heights. 105 products were used, being varied regarding shape, dimensions, weight and type (common products and assistive devices). The data were recorded using CyberGlove instrumented gloves on both hands measuring 18 degrees of freedom on each and seven surface EMG sensors per arm recording muscle activity. Data of more than 4100 ADLs is presented in this dataset as MATLAB structures with full continuous recordings, which may be used in applications such as machine learning or to characterize healthy human hand behaviour. The dataset is accompanied with a custom data visualization application (ERGOMOVMUS) as a tool for ergonomics applications, allowing visualization and calculation of aggregated data from specific task, product and/or participants’ characteristics.