The use of non-invasive methods for the study of respiratory muscle signals can provide clinical information for the evaluation of the respiratory muscle function. The aim of this study was to evaluate time-frequency characteristics of the electrical activity of the sternocleidomastoid muscle recorded superficially by means of concentric ring electrodes (CREs) in a bipolar configuration. The CREs enhance the spatial resolution, attenuate interferences, as the cardiac activity, and also simplify the orientation problem associated to the electrode location. Five healthy subjects underwent a respiratory load test in which an inspiratory load was imposed during the inspiratory phase. During the test, the electromyographic signal of the sternocleidomastoid muscle (EMGsc) and the inspiratory mouth pressure (Pmouth) were acquired. Time-frequency characteristics of the EMGsc signal were analyzed by means of eight timefrequency representations (TFRs): the spectrogram (SPEC), the Morlet scalogram (SCAL), the Wigner-Ville distribution (WVD), the Choi-Williams distribution (CHWD), two generalized exponential distributions (GED1 and GED2), the Born- Jordan distribution (BJD) and the Cone-Kernel distribution (CKD). The instantaneous central frequency of the EMGsc showed an increasing behavior during the inspiratory cycle and with the increase of the inspiratory load. The bilinear TFRs (WVD, CHWD, GEDs and BJD) were less sensitive to cardiac activity interference than classical TFRs (SPEC and SCAL). The GED2 was the TFR that shown the best results for the characterization of the instantaneous central frequency of the EMGsc.

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