Need help with ways to measure muscle activity

[favetelinguis]

I'm doing a university project in Sweden where i want to continuously measure the activity in the Bulbospongiosus muscle.
Is there any cheap easy method/instrument for doing this or do i need expensive professional medical equipment for this?
The main problem i see is how to isolate the measuring to only the superficially located Bulbospongiosus muscel and not having the data distorted by the activity in the surrounding muscles...

Hope you can help me in the right direction.

 

[favetelinguis]

No one with experience in this?

 

[Epsillon]

Im not sure how you could do this without completely removing the muscle. I have never worked with that muscle but I have isolated other muscles and suspended them in Ringers Solution and connected the muscle to an isometric force transducer to measure its contraction.

 

[favetelinguis]

It looks hard to do yes. Every one i have asked says there is no way to do this. Guess it is back to the drawing board.

 

[Moonbear]

I can't imagine your subjects would agree to invasive measurement of THAT muscle, which would be the only way I know to isolate it from surrounding muscles, but I'm also not very well-versed on methods of measuring muscle function.

 

[Yanick]

It depends on what you want to measure. Measuring tension in a muscle, AFAIK (and I'm not expert by far), requires invasive procedures as mentioned above.

Another method I've seen in the literature is electromyography.

Another idea is just to read some methods sections of papers that deal with measuring muscular activity to see what others have done. This can give you some ideas of reliable and acceptable methodologies to measure various characteristics of muscles.