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Accurately predicting joint torque using wearable sensors is crucial for designing assist-as-needed exoskeleton controllers to assist muscle-generated torque and ensure successful task performance. In this paper, we estimated ankle dorsiflexion/plantarflexion, knee flexion/extension, hip flexion/extension, and hip abduction/adduction torques from electromyography (EMG) and kinematics during daily activities using neuromusculoskeletal (NMS) models and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. The joint torque ground truth for model calibrating and training was obtained through inverse dynamics of captured motion data. A cluster approach that grouped movements based on characteristic similarity was implemented, and its ability to improve the estimation accuracy of both NMS and LSTM models was evaluated. We compared torque estimation accuracy of NMS and LSTM models in three cases: Pooled, Individual, and Clustered models. Pooled models used data from all 10 movements to calibrate or train one model, Individual models used data from each individual movement, and Clustered models used data from each cluster. Individual, Clustered and Pooled LSTM models all had relatively high joint torque estimation accuracy. Individual and Clustered NMS models had similarly good estimation performance whereas the Pooled model may be too generic to satisfy all movement patterns. While the cluster approach improved the estimation accuracy in NMS models in some movements, it made relatively little difference in the LSTM neural networks, which already had high estimation accuracy. Our study provides practical implications for designing assist-as-needed exoskeleton controllers by offering guidelines for selecting the appropriate model for different scenarios, and has potential to enhance the functionality of wearable exoskeletons and improve rehabilitation and assistance for individuals with motor disorders., QC 20231016

Estimation of joint torque during movement provides important information in several settings, such as effect of athletes' training or of a medical intervention, or analysis of the remaining muscle strength in a wearer of an assistive device. The ability to estimate joint torque during daily activities using wearable sensors is increasingly relevant in such settings. In this study, lower limb joint torques during ten daily activities were predicted by long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks and transfer learning. LSTM models were trained with muscle electromyography signals and lower limb joint angles. Hip flexion/extension, hip abduction/adduction, knee flexion/extension and ankle dorsiflexion/plantarflexion torques were predicted. The LSTM models' performance in predicting torque was investigated in both intra-subject and inter-subject scenarios. Each scenario was further divided into intra-task and inter-task tests. We observed that LSTM models could predict lower limb joint torques during various activities accurately with relatively low error (root mean square error <= 0.14 Nm/kg, normalized root mean square error <= 8.7%) either through a uniform model or through ten separate models in intra-subject tests. Furthermore, a transfer learning technique was adopted in the inter-task and inter-subject tests to further improve the generalizability of LSTM models by pre-training a model on multiple subjects and/or tasks and transferring the learned knowledge to a target task/subject. Particularly in the inter-subject tests, we could predict joint torques accurately in several movements after training from only a few movements from new subjects., QC 20220412