Search

This paper proposes a system for hand movement recognition using multichannel electromyographic (EMG) signals obtained from the forearm surface. This system can be used to control prostheses or to provide inputs for a wide range of human computer interface systems. In this work, the hand movement recognition problem is formulated as a multi-class distance based classification of multi-dimensional sequences. More specifically, the extraction of multi-channel EMG activation trajectories underlying hand movements, and classifying the extracted trajectories using a metric based on multi-dimensional dynamic time warping are investigated. The developed methods are evaluated using the publicly available NINAPro database comprised of 40 different hand movements performed by 40 subjects. The average movement error rate obtained across the 40 subjects is 0.09\pm 0.047. The low error rate demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed trajectory extraction method and the discriminability of the utilized distance metric. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Evaluation of patients with suspected neuromuscular disorders is typically based on qualitative visual and auditory assessment of needle detected eletromyographic (EMG) signals; the resulting muscle characterization is subjective and highly dependent on the skill and experience of the examiner. Quantitative electromyography (QEMG) techniques were developed to extract motor unit potential trains (MUPTs) from needle detected EMG signals, and estimate features capturing motor unit potential (MUP) morphology and quantifying morphological consistency across MUPs belonging to the same MUPT. The aim of this study is to improve available methods for obtaining transparent muscle characterizations from features obtained using QEMG techniques. More specifically, we investigate the following. 1) Can the use of binarization mappings improve muscle categorization accuracies of transparent methods? 2) What are the appropriate binarization mappings in terms of accuracy and transparency? Results from four different sets of examined limb muscles (342 muscles in total) demonstrate that four out of the 10 investigated binarization mappings based on transparent characterization methods outperformed the multi-class characterizers based on Gaussian mixture models (GMM) and the corresponding binarization mappings based on GMM. This suggests that the use of an appropriate binarization mapping can overcome the decrease in categorization accuracy associated with quantizing MUPT features, which is necessary to obtain transparent characterizations. This performance gain can be attributed to the use of more relevant features and tuned quantization to obtain more specific binary characterizations.