Classification of electromyography signals using relevance vector machines and fractal dimension

A Review on Machine Learning Approaches in Identification of Pediatric Epilepsy

Epilepsy is the second most common neurological disease after Alzheimer. It is a disorder of the brain which results in recurrent seizures. Though the epilepsy in general is considered as a serious disorder, its effects in children are rather dangerous. It is mainly because it reasons a slower rate of development and a failure to improve certain skills among such children. Seizures are the most common symptom of epilepsy. As a regular medical procedure, the specialists record brain activity using an electroencephalogram (EEG) to observe epileptic seizures. The detection of these seizures is performed by specialists, but the results might not be accurate and depend on the specialist's experience; therefore, automated detection of epileptic pediatric seizures might be an optimal solution. In this regard, several techniques have been investigated in the literature. This research aims to review the approaches to pediatric epilepsy seizures' identification especially those based on machine learning, in addition to the techniques applied on the CHB-MIT scalp EEG database of epileptic pediatric signals.

Estimation of Knee Extension Force Using Mechanomyography Signals Based on GRA and ICS-SVR

During lower-extremity rehabilitation training, muscle activity status needs to be monitored in real time to adjust the assisted force appropriately, but it is a challenging task to obtain muscle force noninvasively. Mechanomyography (MMG) signals offer unparalleled advantages over sEMG, reflecting the intention of human movement while being noninvasive. Therefore, in this paper, based on MMG, a combined scheme of gray relational analysis (GRA) and support vector regression optimized by an improved cuckoo search algorithm (ICS-SVR) is proposed to estimate the knee joint extension force. Firstly, the features reflecting muscle activity comprehensively, such as time-domain features, frequency-domain features, time–frequency-domain features, and nonlinear dynamics features, were extracted from MMG signals, and the relational degree was calculated using the GRA method to obtain the correlation features with high relatedness to the knee joint extension force sequence. Then, a combination of correlated features with high relational degree was input into the designed ICS-SVR model for muscle force estimation. The experimental results show that the evaluation indices of the knee joint extension force estimation obtained by the combined scheme of GRA and ICS-SVR were superior to other regression models and could estimate the muscle force with higher estimation accuracy. It is further demonstrated that the proposed scheme can meet the need of muscle force estimation required for rehabilitation devices, powered prostheses, etc.

A force levels and gestures integrated multi-task strategy for neural decoding

This paper discusses the problem of decoding gestures represented by surface electromyography (sEMG) signals in the presence of variable force levels. It is an attempt that multi-task learning (MTL) is proposed to recognize gestures and force levels synchronously. First, methods of gesture recognition with different force levels are investigated. Then, MTL framework is presented to improve the gesture recognition performance and give information about force levels. Last but not least, to solve the problem that using the greedy principle in MTL, a modified pseudo-task augmentation (PTA) trajectory is introduced. Experiments conducted on two representative datasets demonstrate that compared with other methods, frequency domain information with convolutional neural network (CNN) is more suitable for gesture recognition with variable force levels. Besides, the feasibility of extracting features that are closely related to both gestures and force levels is verified via MTL. By influencing learning dynamics, the proposed PTA method can improve the results of all tasks, and make it applicable to the case where the main tasks and auxiliary tasks are clear.

Synergistic Myoelectrical Activities of Forearm Muscles Improving Robust Recognition of Multi-Fingered Gestures

Currently, surface electromyography (sEMG) features of the forearm multi-tendon muscles are widely used in gesture recognition, however, there are few investigations on the inherent physiological mechanism of muscle synergies. We aimed to study whether the muscle synergies could be used for gesture recognition. Five healthy participants executed five gestures of daily life (pinch, fist, open hand, grip, and extension) and the sEMG activity was acquired from six forearm muscles. A non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) algorithm was employed to decompose the pre-treated six-channel sEMG data to obtain the muscle synergy matrixes, in which the weights of each muscle channel determined the feature set for hand gesture classification. The results showed that the synergistic features of forearm muscles could be successfully clustered in the feature space, which enabled hand gestures to be recognized with high efficiency. By augmenting the number of participants, the mean recognition rate remained at more than 96% and reflected high robustness. We showed that muscle synergies can be well applied to gesture recognition.

Non-Uniform Sample Assignment in Training Set Improving Recognition of Hand Gestures Dominated with Similar Muscle Activities

So far, little is known how the sample assignment of surface electromyogram (sEMG) features in training set influences the recognition efficiency of hand gesture, and the aim of this study is to explore the impact of different sample arrangements in training set on the classification of hand gestures dominated with similar muscle activation patterns. Seven right-handed healthy subjects (24.2 ± 1.2 years) were recruited to perform similar grasping tasks (fist, spherical, and cylindrical grasping) and similar pinch tasks (finger, key, and tape pinch). Each task was sustained for 4 s and followed by a 5-s rest interval to avoid fatigue, and the procedure was repeated 60 times for every task. sEMG were recorded from six forearm hand muscles during grasping or pinch tasks, and 4-s sEMG from each channel was segmented for empirical mode decomposition analysis trial by trial. The muscle activity was quantified with zero crossing (ZC) and Wilson amplitude (WAMP) of the first four resulting intrinsic mode function. Thereafter, a sEMG feature vector was constructed with the ZC and WAMP of each channel sEMG, and a classifier combined with support vector machine and genetic algorithm was used for hand gesture recognition. The sample number for each hand gesture was designed to be rearranged according to different sample proportion in training set, and corresponding recognition rate was calculated to evaluate the effect of sample assignment change on gesture classification. Either for similar grasping or pinch tasks, the sample assignment change in training set affected the overall recognition rate of candidate hand gesture. Compare to conventional results with uniformly assigned training samples, the recognition rate of similar pinch gestures was significantly improved when the sample of finger-, key-, and tape-pinch gesture were assigned as 60, 20, and 20%, respectively. Similarly, the recognition rate of similar grasping gestures also rose when the sample proportion of fist, spherical, and cylindrical grasping was 40, 30, and 30%, respectively. Our results suggested that the recognition rate of hand gestures can be regulated by change sample arrangement in training set, which can be potentially used to improve fine-gesture recognition for myoelectric robotic hand exoskeleton control.