A Smartphone-Based sEMG Signal Analysis System for Human Action Recognition

In lower-limb rehabilitation, human action recognition (HAR) technology can be introduced to analyze the surface electromyography (sEMG) signal generated by movements, which can provide an objective and accurate evaluation of the patient’s action. To balance the long cycle required for rehabilitation and the inconvenient factors brought by wearing sEMG devices, a portable sEMG signal acquisition device was developed that can be used under daily scenarios. Additionally, a mobile application was developed to meet the demand for real-time monitoring and analysis of sEMG signals. This application can monitor data in real time and has functions such as plotting, filtering, storage, and action capture and recognition. To build the dataset required for the recognition model, six lower-limb motions were developed for rehabilitation (kick, toe off, heel off, toe off and heel up, step back and kick, and full gait). The sEMG segment and action label were combined for training a convolutional neural network (CNN) to achieve high-precision recognition performance for human lower-limb actions (with a maximum accuracy of 97.96% and recognition accuracy for all actions reaching over 97%). The results show that the smartphone-based sEMG analysis system proposed in this paper can provide reliable information for the clinical evaluation of lower-limb rehabilitation.