EMG Wrist-hand Motion Recognition System for Real-time Embedded Platform

Abstract

Electromyography (EMG) signal analysis is a popular method for controlling prosthetic and gesture control equipment. For portable systems, such as prosthetic limbs, real-time low-power operation on embedded processors is critical, but to date there has been no record of how existing EMG analysis approaches support such deployments. This paper presents a novel approach to time-domain classification of multichannel EMG signals harnessed from randomly-placed sensors according to the wrist-hand movements which caused their occurrence. It shows how, by employing a very small set of time-domain features, Kernel Fisher discriminant feature projection and Radial Bias Function neural network classifiers, nine wrist-hand movements can be detected with accuracy exceeding 99% - surpassing the state-of-the-art on record. It also shows how, when deployed on ARM Cortex-A53, the processing time is not only sufficient to enable real-time processing but is also a factor 50 shorter than the leading time-frequency techniques on record.