Real-time Continuous Hand Motion Myoelectric Decoding by Automated Data Labeling

In this paper an automated data labeling (ADL) neural network is proposed to streamline dataset collecting for real-time predicting the continuous motion of hand and wrist, these gestures are only decoded from a surface electromyography (sEMG) array of eight channels. Unlike collecting both the bio-signals and hand motion signals as samples and labels in supervised learning, this algorithm only collects unlabeled sEMG into an unsupervised neural network, in which the hand motion labels are auto-generated. The coefficient of determination (R
²
) for three DOFs, i.e. wrist flex/extension, wrist pro/supination, hand open/close, was 0.86, 0.89 and 0.87 respectively. The comparison between real motion labels and auto-generated labels shows that the latter has earlier response than former. The results of Fitts’ law test indicate that ADL has capability of controlling multi-DOFs simultaneously even though the training set only contains sEMG data from single DOF gesture. Moreover, no more hand motion measurement needed which greatly helps upper limb amputee imagine the gesture of residual limb to control a dexterous prosthesis.