THE EFFECTS OF ELECTRODE IMPLANTATION AND TARGETING ON PATTERN CLASSIFICATION ACCURACY FOR PROSTHESIS CONTROL

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND: Many researchers have attempted to recognize patterns of muscle activity associated with different movements of the phantom limb and link these patterns to movements of the prosthesis. Researchers have examined a variety of different classifiers and extracted complex features from the electromyographic (EMG) signals to maximize classification accuracy. However, nearly all of these efforts used surface electrodes. Surface electrodes are advantageous because they are cheap, non-invasive and have a large pickup area. Extracting features from these recordings can allow the classifier to parse out the activity from the different muscles that sum together to produce the myoelectric signal and may increase the information available to the classifier. Alternatively, intramuscular electrodes may be advantageous for multifunctional prosthesis control because they record focally from deep muscles, provide consistent recording sites as the