Real-Time and Offline Evaluation of Myoelectric Pattern Recognition for the Decoding of Hand Movements

Pattern recognition algorithms have been widely used to map surface electromyographic signals to target movements as a source for prosthetic control. However, most investigations have been conducted offline by performing the analysis on pre-recorded datasets. While real-time data analysis (i.e., classification when new data becomes available, with limits on latency under 200-300 milliseconds) plays an important role in the control of prosthetics, less knowledge has been gained with respect to real-time performance. Recent literature has underscored the differences between offline classification accuracy, the most common performance metric, and the usability of upper limb prostheses. Therefore, a comparative offline and real-time performance analysis between common algorithms had yet to be performed. In this study, we investigated the offline and real-time performance of nine different classification algorithms, decoding ten individual hand and wrist movements. Surface myoelectric signals were recorded from fifteen able-bodied subjects while performing the ten movements. The offline decoding demonstrated that linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) significantly (p < 0.05) outperformed other classifiers, with an average classification accuracy of above 97%. On the other hand, the real-time investigation revealed that, in addition to the LDA and MLE, multilayer perceptron also outperformed the other algorithms and achieved a classification accuracy and completion rate of above 68% and 69%, respectively.