User-Independent Hand Motion Classification With Electromyography

Electromyographic (EMG) processing is an important research area with direct applications to prosthetics, exoskeletons and human-machine interaction. Current state of the art decoding methods require intensive training on a single user before it can be utilized, and have been unable to achieve both user-independence and real-time performance. This paper presents a real-time EMG classification method which generalizes across users without requiring an additional training phase. An EMG-embedded sleeve quickly positions and records from EMG surface electrodes on six forearm muscles. An optimized decision tree classifies signals from these sensors into five distinct movements for any given user using EMG energy synergies between muscles. This method was tested on 10 healthy subjects using leave-one-out validation, resulting in an overall accuracy of 79±6.6%, with sensitivity and specificity averaging 66% and 97.6%, respectively, over all classified motions. The high specificity values demonstrate the ability to generalize across users, presenting opportunities for large-scale studies and broader accessibility to EMG-driven applications.