Mechanomyography (MMG) is a low-frequency signal emitted during muscle contraction; it can overcome the inherently unreliable defects of electromyography (EMG) and electroencephalography (EEG). For MMG-based movement pattern recognition, this paper proposes an innovative kernel extreme learning machine (KELM) based on the chaotic particle swarm optimization (CPSO), namely CPSO–KELM. By using CPSO–KELM in MMG-based movement pattern recognition, the classification accuracy of upper-limb movement has been improved, and the results can be better applied to the control of passive rehabilitation training of the upper-limb exoskeleton, which can provide help for the upper extremity rehabilitation of stroke patients. In this paper, MMG which is used for pattern recognition research, is collected by accelerometers when the subjects performed seven types of upper-limb rehabilitation movements. After filtering and segmentation, six time-domain features are extracted for the MMG of each channel, then kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) and principal component analysis (PCA) are used to reduce the feature dimensions. By using different classifiers to build classification models, the average recognition accuracies of movement classification under different processing methods are obtained; it is found that for most classifiers, the recognition rate of MMG after KPCA dimensionality reduction is better than that of PCA, and the overall recognition rate of upper-limb movements using the CPSO–KELM classifier can reach 97.1%, which is better than support vector machine (SVM), back-propagation neural network (BPNN), linear discriminant algorithm (LDA) and other MMG common classifiers in recognition accuracy. Moreover, the experimental analysis shows that compared with genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO), CPSO has faster convergence and smaller training error, and the final recognition accuracy proves that the performance of CPSO–KELM is better than those of GA–KELM and PSO–KELM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]