Enhanced Performance for Multi-Forearm Movement Decoding Using Hybrid IMU–sEMG Interface

Control of active prosthetic hands using surface electromyography (sEMG) signals is an active research area; despite the advances in sEMG pattern recognition and classification techniques, none of the commercially available prosthetic hands provide the user with an intuitive control. One of the major reasons for this disparity between academia and industry is the variation of sEMG signals in a dynamic environment as opposed to the controlled laboratory conditions. This research investigated the effects of sEMG signal variation on the performance of a hand motion classifier due to arm position variation and also explored the effect of static position and dynamic movement strategies for classifier training. A wearable system is used to measure the electrical activity of the muscles and the position of the forearm while performing six classes of hand motions. The system is made position aware (POS) using inertial measurement units (IMUs) for different arm movement gestures. The hand gestures are decoded under both static and dynamic forearm movements. Four time domain (TD) features are extracted from the sEMG signals along with IMU-based arm position information. The features are trained and tested using linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and support vector machine (SVM) for both TD and TD-POS features. The results for the SVM show a significant difference between the static and dynamic approaches, while the TD-POS features show enhanced classification performance in comparison to the TD-based classification. Results have shown the effectiveness of the dynamic training approach and sensor fusion techniques to improve the performance of existing stand-alone sEMG-based prosthetic control systems.