Human Muscular Manipulability is a metric that measures the comfort of an specific pose and it can be used for a variety of applications related to healthcare. For this reason, we introduce KIMHu: a Kinematic, Imaging and electroMyography dataset for Human muscular manipulability index prediction. The dataset is comprised of images, depth maps, skeleton tracking data, electromyography recordings and 3 different Human Muscular Manipulability indexes of 20 participants performing different physical exercises with their arm. The methodology followed to acquire and process the data is also presented for future replication. A specific analysis framework for Human Muscular Manipulability is proposed in order to provide benchmarking tools based on this dataset.

In this work, we evaluate the relationship between human manipulability indices obtained from motion sensing cameras and a variety of muscular factors extracted from surface electromyography (sEMG) signals from the upper limb during specific movements that include the shoulder, elbow and wrist joints. The results show specific links between upper limb movements and manipulability, revealing that extreme poses show less manipulability, i.e., when the arms are fully extended or fully flexed. However, there is not a clear correlation between the sEMG signals’ average activity and manipulability factors, which suggests that muscular activity is, at least, only indirectly related to human pose singularities. A possible means to infer these correlations, if any, would be the use of advanced deep learning techniques. We also analyze a set of EMG metrics that give insights into how muscular effort is distributed during the exercises. This set of metrics could be used to obtain good indicators for the quantitative evaluation of sequences of movements according to the milestones of a rehabilitation therapy or to plan more ergonomic and bearable movement phases in a working task.