Decoding of Multiple Wrist and Hand Movements Using a Transient EMG Classifier

Journal article, 2023

The design of prosthetic controllers by means of neurophysiological signals still poses a crucial challenge to bioengineers. State of the art of electromyographic (EMG) continuous pattern recognition controllers rely on the questionable assumption that repeated muscular contractions produce repeatable patterns of steady-state EMG signals. Conversely, we propose an algorithm that decodes wrist and hand movements by processing the signals that immediately follow the onset of contraction (i.e., the \textit {transient} EMG). We collected EMG data from the forearms of 14 non-amputee and 5 transradial amputee participants while they performed wrist flexion/extension, pronation/supination, and four hand grasps (power, lateral, bi-digital, open). We firstly identified the combination of wrist and hand movements that yielded the best control performance for the same participant (intra-subject classification). Then, we assessed the ability of our algorithm to classify participant data that were not included in the training set (cross-subject classification). Our controller achieved a median accuracy of 96% with non-amputees, while it achieved heterogeneous outcomes with amputees, with a median accuracy of 89%. Importantly, for each amputee, it produced at least one \textit {acceptable} combination of wrist-hand movements (i.e., with accuracy >85%). Regarding the cross-subject classifier, while our algorithm obtained promising results with non-amputees (accuracy up to 80%), they were not as good with amputees (accuracy up to 35%), possibly suggesting further assessments with domain-adaptation strategies. In general, our offline outcomes, together with a preliminary online assessment, support the hypothesis that the transient EMG decoding could represent a viable pattern recognition strategy, encouraging further online assessments.