Cumulative Spike Train Estimation for Muscle Excitation Assessment From Surface EMG Using Spatial Spike Detection

Estimating cumulative spike train (CST) of motor units (MUs) from surface electromyography (sEMG) is essential for the effective control of neural interfaces. However, the limited accuracy of existing estimation methods greatly hinders the further development of neural interface. This paper proposes a simple but effective approach for identifying CST based on spatial spike detection from high-density sEMG. Specifically, we use a spatial sliding window to detect spikes according to the spatial propagation characteristics of the motor unit action potential, focusing on the spikes of activated MUs in a local area rather than those of a specific MU. We validated the effectiveness of our proposed method through an experiment involving wrist flexion/extension and pronation/supination, comparing it with a recognized CST estimation method and an MU decomposition based method. The results demonstrated that the proposed method obtained higher accuracy on multi-DoF wrist torque estimation leveraging the estimated CST compared to the other three methods. On average, the correlation coefficient (R) and the normalized root mean square error (nRMSE) between the estimation results and recorded force were 0.96 ± 0.03 and 10.1% ± 3.7%, respectively. Moreover, there was an extremely high interpretive extent between the CSTs of proposed method and the MU decomposition method. The outcomes reveal the superiority of the proposed method in identifying CSTs and can provide promising driven signals for neural interface.