Atlas of voluntary facial muscle activation: Visualization of surface electromyographic activities of facial muscles during mimic exercises

Complex facial muscle movements are essential for many motoric and emotional functions. Facial muscles are unique in the musculoskeletal system as they are interwoven, so that the contraction of one muscle influences the contractility characteristic of other mimic muscles. The facial muscles act more as a whole than as single facial muscle movements. The standard for clinical and psychosocial experiments to detect these complex interactions is surface electromyography (sEMG). What is missing, is an atlas showing which facial muscles are activated during specific tasks. Based on high-resolution sEMG data of 10 facial muscles of both sides of the face simultaneously recorded during 29 different facial muscle tasks, an atlas visualizing voluntary facial muscle activation was developed. For each task, the mean normalized EMG amplitudes of the examined facial muscles were visualized by colors. The colors were spread between the lowest and highest EMG activity. Gray shades represent no to very low EMG activities, light and dark brown shades represent low to medium EMG activities and red shades represent high to very high EMG activities relatively with respect to each task. The present atlas should become a helpful tool to design sEMG experiments not only for clinical trials and psychological experiments, but also for speech therapy and orofacial rehabilitation studies.