Recurrent Fusion of Time-Domain Descriptors Improves EMG-based Hand Movement Recognition

Controlling powered prostheses with myoelectric pattern recognition (PR) provides a natural human-robot interfacing scheme for amputees who lost their limbs. Research in this direction reveals that the challenges prohibiting reliable clinical translation of myoelectric interfaces are mainly driven by the quality of the extracted features. Hence, developing accurate and reliable feature extraction techniques is of vital importance for facilitating clinical implementation of Electromyogram (EMG) PR systems. To overcome this challenge, we proposed a combination of Range Spatial Filtering (RSF) and Recurrent Fusion of Time Domain Descriptors (RFTDD) in order to improve the classifier performance and make the prosthetic hand control more appropriate for clinical applications. RSF is used to increase the number of EMG signals available for feature extraction by focusing on the spatial information between all possible logical combinations of the physical EMG channels. RFTDD is then used to capture the temporal information by applying a recurrent data fusion process on the resulting orientation-based time-domain (TD) features, with a sigmoidal function to limit the features range and overcome the vanishing amplitudes problem. The main advantages of the proposed method include 1) its potential in capturing the temporal-spatial dependencies of the EMG signals, leading to reduced classification errors, and 2) the simplicity with which the features are extracted, as any kind of simple TD features can be adopted with this method. The performance of the proposed RFTDD is then benchmarked across many well-known TD features individually and as sets to prove the power of the RFTDD method on two EMG datasets with a total of 31 subjects. Testing results revealed an approximate reduction of 12% in classification errors across all subjects when using the proposed method against traditional feature extraction methods.Clinical Relevance—Establishing significance and importance of RFTDD, with simple time-domain features, for robust and low-cost clinical applications.