A novel energy-motion model for continuous sEMG decoding: from muscle energy to motor pattern

At present, sEMG-based gesture recognition requires vast amounts of training data; otherwise it is limited to a few gestures.Objective. This paper presents a novel dynamic energy model that decodes continuous hand actions by training small amounts of sEMG data.Approach. The activation of forearm muscles can set the corresponding fingers in motion or state with movement trends. The moving fingers store kinetic energy, and the fingers with movement trends store potential energy. The kinetic energy and potential energy in each finger are dynamically allocated due to the adaptive-coupling mechanism of five-fingers in actual motion. Meanwhile, the sum of the two energies remains constant at a certain muscle activation. We regarded hand movements with the same direction of acceleration for five-finger as the same in energy mode and divided hand movements into ten energy modes. Independent component analysis and machine learning methods were used to model associations between sEMG signals and energy modes and expressed gestures by energy form adaptively. This theory imitates the self-adapting mechanism in actual tasks. Thus, ten healthy subjects were recruited, and three experiments mimicking activities of daily living were designed to evaluate the interface: (1) the expression of untrained gestures, (2) the decoding of the amount of single-finger energy, and (3) real-time control.Main results. (1) Participants completed the untrained hand movements (100/100,p< 0.0001). (2) The interface performed better than chance in the experiment where participants pricked balloons with a needle tip (779/1000,p< 0.0001). (3) In the experiment where participants punched a hole in the plasticine on the balloon, the success rate was over 95% (97.67 ± 5.04%,p< 0.01).Significance. The model can achieve continuous hand actions with speed or force information by training small amounts of sEMG data, which reduces learning task complexity.