Towards better understanding and reducing the effect of limb position on myoelectric upper-limb prostheses

Myoelectric control of prosthetic devices tend to rely on classification schemes of extracted features of EMG data. Those features however, may be sensitive to arm position resulting in decreased performance in real-world applications. The effect of varying limb position in a pattern recognition system have been illustrated by documenting the change in classification accuracy as the user achieves particular limb configurations. We continue to investigate this limb position effect by observing its impact on classification accuracy as well as through an analysis of how each extracted feature of the raw EMG varies in each position. Finally, LDA classification schemes are applied both to demonstrate the effect varying limb position has on classification accuracy and to increase classification accuracy without the use of additional hardware or sensors such as accelerometers as has been done in the past. It is shown that high classification accuracy can be achieved by (1) training an LDA classifier with data from many positions, as well as (2) by utilizing an extra position LDA classifier which can weigh the grasp classifiers appropriately. The classification accuracies achieved by these methods approached that of a model relying on a perfect knowledge of arm position.