In this study, we proposed a precise onset and offset detection algorithm for muscle activation by using an electromyogram (EMG). The adaptive threshold was determined using the constant false alarm rate algorithm. The EMG signal was refined by morphological hole filling, which is used to close up and fill out missing information. By exploiting the EMG amplitude ratio in two channels, we significantly improved the offset detection performance. The proposed method does not require a training process, unlike conventional methods. The experimental results indicated that the estimated errors for both the onset and offset detection are lower than those obtained using two of the conventional methods.

We provide a novel method to infer finger flexing motions using a four-channel surface electromyogram (EMG). Surface EMG signals can be recorded from the human body non-invasively and easily. Surface EMG signals in this study were obtained from four channel electrodes placed around the forearm. The motions consist of the flexion of five single fingers (thumb, index finger, middle finger, ring finger, and little finger) and three multi.finger motions. The maximum likelihood estimation was used to infer the finger motions. Experimental results have shown that this method can successfully infer the finger flexing motions. The average accuracy was as high as 97.75%. In addition, we examined the influence of inference accuracies with the various arm postures.

In the recognition of electromyogram-based hand gestures, the recognition accuracy may be degraded during the actual stage of practical applications for various reasons such as electrode positioning bias and different subjects. Besides these, the change in electromyogram signals due to different arm postures even for identical hand gestures is also an important issue. We propose an electromyogram-based hand gesture recognition technique robust to diverse arm postures. The proposed method uses both the signals of the accelerometer and electromyogram simultaneously to recognize correct hand gestures even for various arm postures. For the recognition of hand gestures, the electromyogram signals are statistically modeled considering the arm postures. In the experiments, we compared the cases that took into account the arm postures with the cases that disregarded the arm postures for the recognition of hand gestures. In the cases in which varied arm postures were disregarded, the recognition accuracy for correct hand gestures was 54.1%, whereas the cases using the method proposed in this study showed an 85.7% average recognition accuracy for hand gestures, an improvement of more than 31.6%. In this study, accelerometer and electromyogram signals were used simultaneously, which compensated the effect of different arm postures on the electromyogram signals and therefore improved the recognition accuracy of hand gestures.

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In this work, we propose a new method of robot navigation control through electromyogram (EMG) and acceleration sensors attached to human arms. This method allows the user to control the robot remotely by his/her intuitive motion like car steering. EMG signal processing decides whether to control the robot or not. Then, the robot takes a motion out of 4 possible motions (Forward, Backward, Left turn, Right turn) that is inferred from acceleration sensor. The accuracy of the motion discrimination has the success rate of 99% without any time delay. The whole system was implemented and we verified its utility by humanoid robot demonstration.