An exploratory study to design a novel hand movement identification system

Electromyogram signal (EMG) is an electrical manifestation of contractions of muscles. Surface EMG (sEMG) signal collected from the surface of skin has been used in diverse applications. One of its usages is in pattern recognition of hand prosthesis movements. The ability of current prosthesis devices has been generally limited to simple opening and closing tasks, minimizing their efficacy compared to natural hand capabilities. In order to extend the abilities and accuracy of prosthesis arm movements and performance, a novel sEMG pattern recognizing system is proposed. To extract more pertinent information we extracted sEMGs for selected hand movements. These features constitute our main knowledge of the signal for different hand movements. In this study, we investigated time domain, time-frequency domain and combination of these as a compound representation of sEMG signal's features to access required signal information. In order to implement pattern recognition of sEMG signals for various hand movements, two intelligent classifiers, namely artificial neural network (ANN) and fuzzy inference system (FIS), were utilized. The results indicate that our approach of using compound features with principle component analysis (PCA) as dimensionality reduction technique, and FIS as the classifier, provides the best performance for sEMG pattern recognition system.