EMG Lab

EMG Lab: 

What is EMG? EMG is a graphical recording of electrical activity within the muscles.

When the muscles are activated by nerves it results in changes in ion flow across cell membranes. This generates electrical activity. During this lab, we tested the electrical activity within the muscles of your jaw while eating different types of food, varying in hardness. 

Hypothesis:

If we differ the hardness in foods, then the jaw muscles will show more electrical activity because the jaw works harder to chew harder foods then it does softer things.

Materials:

EKG probe and electrode tabs

Different types of food

Mouth :) (Someone to eat)

Experiment:

We hooked up Sierra to the probes to study her electrical activity. She had probes on her upper and lower jaw. First, we had a baseline (Sierra clenched her jaw and recorded the activity). Sierra rested her jaw for 5 seconds between each different types of food. We then gave her 8 different types of food (pudding, BBQ chips, carrots, chocolate chip cookies, a banana, celery, Dr. Pepper, & beef jerky)

Results:

Analysis:

As you can see, different types of food had different types of activity. The average activity was o.5 mV. The highest, surprisingly, was pudding with 2.2mV. We believe that the pudding had the highest amount of activity because the jaw moves more while trying to swallow the pudding because you don't have to chew as much. The lowest activity was Dr. Pepper. We believe this was because drinking liquids don't involve much of any activity. 

Conclusion:

We can conclude that our hypothesis is sometimes true, but not always. Celery is in fact harder then things such as Dr. Pepper, but this is not the case with celery and pudding. Even though our hypothesis was partially incorrect, we had a great time conducting the lab and actually learned a lot!!