Development of the hand motion recognition system based on surface EMG using suitable measurement channels for pattern recognition

Reduce Surface Electromyography Channels for Gesture Recognition by Multitask Sparse Representation and Minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance

Surface electromyography- (sEMG-) based gesture recognition is widely used in rehabilitation training, artificial prosthesis, and human-computer interaction. The purpose of this study is to simplify the sEMG devices by reducing channels while achieving comparably high gesture recognition accuracy. We propose a compound channel selection scheme by combining the variable selection algorithms based on multitask sparse representation (MTSR) and minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance (mRMR). Specifically, channelwise features are first extracted to compose channel-feature paired variables, for which variable selection procedures by MTSR and mRMR are carried out, respectively. Then, we rank all the channels according to their occurrences in each variable selection procedure and figure out a certain number of informative channels by fusing these rankings of channels. Finally, the gesture classification performance using the selected channels is evaluated by the support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Experiment results validate the effectiveness of this proposed method.

High-density force myography: A possible alternative for upper-limb prosthetic control

Several multiple degree-of-freedom upper-limb prostheses that have the promise of highly dexterous control have recently been developed. Inadequate controllability, however, has limited adoption of these devices. Introducing more robust control methods will likely result in higher acceptance rates. This work investigates the suitability of using high-density force myography (HD-FMG) for prosthetic control. HD-FMG uses a high-density array of pressure sensors to detect changes in the pressure patterns between the residual limb and socket caused by the contraction of the forearm muscles. In this work, HD-FMG outperforms the standard electromyography (EMG)-based system in detecting different wrist and hand gestures. With the arm in a fixed, static position, eight hand and wrist motions were classified with 0.33% error using the HD-FMG technique. Comparatively, classification errors in the range of 2.2%-11.3% have been reported in the literature for multichannel EMG-based approaches. As with EMG, position variation in HD-FMG can introduce classification error, but incorporating position variation into the training protocol reduces this effect. Channel reduction was also applied to the HD-FMG technique to decrease the dimensionality of the problem as well as the size of the sensorized area. We found that with informed, symmetric channel reduction, classification error could be decreased to 0.02%.

A real-time pinch-to-zoom motion detection by means of a surface EMG-based human-computer interface

In this paper, we propose a system for inferring the pinch-to-zoom gesture using surface EMG (Electromyography) signals in real time. Pinch-to-zoom, which is a common gesture in smart devices such as an iPhone or an Android phone, is used to control the size of images or web pages according to the distance between the thumb and index finger. To infer the finger motion, we recorded EMG signals obtained from the first dorsal interosseous muscle, which is highly related to the pinch-to-zoom gesture, and used a support vector machine for classification between four finger motion distances. The powers which are estimated by Welch's method were used as feature vectors. In order to solve the multiclass classification problem, we applied a one-versus-one strategy, since a support vector machine is basically a binary classifier. As a result, our system yields 93.38% classification accuracy averaged over six subjects. The classification accuracy was estimated using 10-fold cross validation. Through our system, we expect to not only develop practical prosthetic devices but to also construct a novel user experience (UX) for smart devices.

A novel channel selection method for multiple motion classification using high-density electromyography

Background

Selecting an appropriate number of surface electromyography (EMG) channels with desired classification performance and determining the optimal placement of EMG electrodes would be necessary and important in practical myoelectric control. In previous studies, several methods such as sequential forward selection (SFS) and Fisher-Markov selector (FMS) have been used to select the appropriate number of EMG channels for a control system. These exiting methods are dependent on either EMG features and/or classification algorithms, which means that when using different channel features or classification algorithm, the selected channels would be changed. In this study, a new method named multi-class common spatial pattern (MCCSP) was proposed for EMG selection in EMG pattern-recognition-based movement classification. Since MCCSP is independent on specific EMG features and classification algorithms, it would be more convenient for channel selection in developing an EMG control system than the exiting methods.

Methods

The performance of the proposed MCCSP method in selecting some optimal EMG channels (designated as a subset) was assessed with high-density EMG recordings from twelve mildly-impaired traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients. With the MCCSP method, a subset of EMG channels was selected and then used for motion classification with pattern recognition technique. In order to justify the performance of the MCCSP method against different electrode configurations, features and classification algorithms, two electrode configurations (unipolar and bipolar) as well as two EMG feature sets and two types of pattern recognition classifiers were considered in the study, respectively. And the performance of the proposed MCCSP method was compared with that of two exiting channel selection methods (SFS and FMS) in EMG control system.

Results

The results showed that in comparison with the previously used SFS and FMS methods, the newly proposed MCCSP method had better motion classification performance. Moreover, a fixed combination of the selected EMG channels was obtained when using MCCSP.

Conclusions

The proposed MCCSP method would be a practicable means in channel selection and would facilitate the design of practical myoelectric control systems in the active rehabilitation of mildly-impaired TBI patients and in other rehabilitation applications such as the multifunctional myoelectric prostheses for limb amputees.

Finger Motion Decoding Using EMG Signals Corresponding Various Arm Postures

We provide a novel method to infer finger flexing motions using a four-channel surface electromyogram (EMG). Surface EMG signals can be recorded from the human body non-invasively and easily. Surface EMG signals in this study were obtained from four channel electrodes placed around the forearm. The motions consist of the flexion of five single fingers (thumb, index finger, middle finger, ring finger, and little finger) and three multi.finger motions. The maximum likelihood estimation was used to infer the finger motions. Experimental results have shown that this method can successfully infer the finger flexing motions. The average accuracy was as high as 97.75%. In addition, we examined the influence of inference accuracies with the various arm postures.