Watching Your Own Hand

When building a lab, it's about the little things.

In part due to the worst winter in forever, the lab was empty on Wednesday afternoon. Nonetheless, I was still trying to get things to work. The oscilloscope was my current dilemma.

I'm not an engineer, and the fool thing has approximately 100 settings. So with some settings e-mailed from Indiana (thanks, James), I sat there tinkering with things.

Finally it looked right, but I needed to see some actual EMG activity (i.e., the electrical signals created by muscle fibers contracting).

We usually get this from facial muscles, but it's kind of difficult to put electrodes on one's own face. So I gelled up two electrodes and stuck them on the back of my hand.

Through the bioamplifier and onto the screen of the scope and ... magically ... beautiful little EMG waves appeared on the screen when I squeezed my hand.

If you've never been through the tedium of setting up a lab, you likely cannot appreciate how great this baby step felt.