Optimal feature set for finger movement classification based on sEMG

Cardinality and Short-Term Memory Concepts based Novel Feature Extraction for Myoelectric Pattern Recognition

The quality of the extracted traditional hand-crafted Electromyogram (EMG) features has been recently identified in the literature as a limiting factor prohibiting the translation from laboratory to clinical settings. To address this limitation, a shift of focus from traditional feature extraction methods to deep learning models was witnessed, as the latter can learn the best feature representation for the task at hand. However, while deep learning models achieve promising results based on raw EMG data, their clinical implementation is often challenged due to their significantly high computational costs (significantly large number of generated models' parameters and a huge amount of data needed for training). This paper is focused on combining the simplicity and low computational characteristics of traditional feature extraction with the memory concepts from Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models to efficiently extract the spatial-temporal dynamics of the EMG signals. The novelty of the proposed method can be summarized in a) the memory concept leveraged from deep learning structures, capturing short-term temporal dependencies of the EMG signals, b) the use of cardinality to generate logical combinations of spatially distinct EMG signals and as a feature extraction method and 3) low computational costs and the enhanced classification performance. The performance of the proposed method is validated using three EMG databases collected with 1) laboratory hardware (9 transradial amputees and 17 intact-limbed), and 2) wearables (22 intact-limed using two wearable consumer armbands). In comparison to several other well-known methods from the literature, the proposed method shows significantly enhanced myoelectric pattern recognition performance, with accuracies reaching up to 99%.

Feature Extraction of Surface Electromyography Based on Improved Small-World Leaky Echo State Network

Surface electromyography (sEMG) is an electrophysiological reflection of skeletal muscle contractile activity that can directly reflect neuromuscular activity. It has been a matter of research to investigate feature extraction methods of sEMG signals. In this letter, we propose a feature extraction method of sEMG signals based on the improved small-world leaky echo state network (ISWLESN). The reservoir of leaky echo state network (LESN) is connected by a random network. First, we improved the reservoir of the echo state network (ESN) by these networks and used edge-added probability to improve these networks. That idea enhances the adaptability of the reservoir, the generalization ability, and the stability of ESN. Then we obtained the output weight of the network through training and used it as features. We recorded the sEMG signals during different activities: falling, walking, sitting, squatting, going upstairs, and going downstairs. Afterward, we extracted corresponding features by ISWLESN and used principal component analysis for dimension reduction. At the end, scatter plot, the class separability index, and the Davies-Bouldin index were used to assess the performance of features. The results showed that the ISWLESN clustering performance was better than those of LESN and ESN. By support vector machine, it was also revealed that the performance of ISWLESN for classifying the activities was better than those of ESN and LESN.