Dimensionality Reduction and Motion Clustering During Activities of Daily Living: Three-, Four-, and Seven-Degree-of-Freedom Arm Movements

Abstract

This paper is the first in a two-part series analyzing human arm and hand motion during a wide range of unstructured tasks. The wide variety of motions performed by the human arm during daily tasks makes it desirable to find representative subsets to reduce the dimensionality of these movements for a variety of applications, including the design and control of robotic and prosthetic devices. This paper presents a novel method and the results of an extensive human subjects study to obtain representative arm joint angle trajectories that span naturalistic motions during Activities of Daily Living (ADLs). In particular, we seek to identify sets of useful motion trajectories of the upper limb that are functions of a single variable, allowing, for instance, an entire prosthetic or robotic arm to be controlled with a single input from a user, along with a means to select between motions for different tasks. Data driven approaches are used to discover clusters and representative motion averages for the wrist 3 degree of freedom (DOF), elbow-wrist 4 DOF, and full-arm 7 DOF motions. The proposed method makes use of well-known techniques such as dynamic time warping (DTW) to obtain a divergence measure between motion segments, Ward's distance criterion to build hierarchical trees, and functional principal component analysis (fPCA) to evaluate cluster variability. The emerging clusters associate various recorded motions into primarily hand start and end location for the full-arm system, motion direction for the wrist-only system, and an intermediate between the two qualities for the elbow-wrist system.

Trajectory Control–An Effective Strategy for Controlling Multi-DOF Upper Limb Prosthetic Devices

“…The prespecified motion trajectories are based on the authors' previous work on arm motions performing activities of daily living (ADL) (Fig. 2) [16]; in total there are 5 trajectories for the 3 DOF device, and 11 trajectories each for the 4 and 7 DOF devices. These trajectories were obtained by clustering and averaging arm motions from healthy participants performing an extensive set of ADL tasks.…”

“…This paper builds upon the authors' previous work, where learned prototypical motions were first developed [16] and tested in a pilot [25], by looking to demonstrate trajectory control as a feasible control method to position and orient the end-effector of various prosthetic devices. A summary of the method that was used to obtain prorotypical motions is included in section II.…”

Characterization and Categorization of Various Human Lower Limb Movements Based on Kinematic Synergies

“…The categories and their movement characteristics can provide references for comparing the performance of the artificial limbs with the human limb, thereby encouraging the development of better mechanical or control systems. In practice, motivated by the advantages of the categorization, researchers have built different taxonomies or classification systems for different types of human movements, such as the taxonomies of hand grasps ( Feix et al, 2016 ; Stival et al, 2019 ), whole-body support poses ( Borras et al, 2017 ), and activities of daily living of upper limb ( Gloumakov et al, 2020a ; Gloumakov et al, 2020b ), and the classification systems of normal walking ( Vardaxis et al, 1998 ; Simonsen and Alkjaer, 2012 ), normal running ( Liebl et al, 2014 ; Phinyomark et al, 2015 ), and pathological walking or running ( Kuntze et al, 2018 ; Jauhiainen et al, 2020 ). However, to our knowledge, a quantitative categorization for the various lower limb movements has not been established to date.…”

Mathematical Model Design for a 7-DOF robot and 6-DOF comparison simulation

“…For this, references were consulted about the last 5 years from three libraries (IEEExplore, IOPScience and ACM Digital Library). Figure 1 shows the line time of the investigations that have as title "Seven Degrees of Freedom" in the last two years this topic has increase its interest [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. Within this review of references, 10 articles were found, which were divided into three main topics.…”

“…Therefore, the articles describing applications of 7-DOF [1][2][3] were placed in the first topic. The study of the kinematics and dynamics of these manipulators is the most developed topic, proposing templates and methods based on 40% of the Denavit Hartenberg (D-H) algorithm [4][5][6][7][8]. An example is the proposed method for redundant manipulator configuration, obtaining a complete analytical inverse kinematics equation in the position space, which eliminates the Jacobian matrix [6].…”