Voting-based 1D CNN model for human lower limb activity recognition using sEMG signal

Surface electromyography (sEMG) signal classification has many applications such as human-machine interaction, diagnosis of kinesiological studies, and neuromuscular diseases. However, these signals are complicated because of different artifacts added to the sEMG signal during recording. In this study, a multi-stage classification technique is proposed for the identification of distinct movements of the lower limbs using sEMG signals acquired from leg muscles of healthy knee and abnormal knee subjects. This investigation involves 11 subjects with a knee abnormality and 11 without knee abnormality for three distinct activities viz. walking, leg extension from sitting position (sitting), and flexion of the leg (standing). Discrete wavelet denoising to fourth level decomposition has been implemented for the artifact reduction and the signal has been segmented using overlapping windowing technique. A study of four different architectures of 1D convolutional neural network models is undertaken for the prediction of lower limb activities and the final prediction is achieved via a voting mechanism of all four model results. The performance parameters of CNN models have been calculated for three different cases: (1) healthy subjects (2) subjects with knee abnormality (3) Pooled data (combination of abnormal knee and healthy knee subjects) using nested threefold cross-validation. It has been found that the voting mechanism yields an average classification accuracy as 99.35%, 97.63%, and 97.14% for healthy subjects, knee abnormal subjects, and pooled data, respectively. The result validates that the proposed voting-based 1D CNN model is efficient and useful in lower limb activity recognition using the sEMG signal.