Effect of Analysis Window and Feature Selection on Classification of Hand Movements Using EMG Signal

Abstract

Electromyography (EMG) signals have been successfully employed for driving prosthetic limbs of a single or double degree of freedom. This principle works by using the amplitude of the EMG signals to decide between one or two simpler movements. This method underperforms as compare to the contemporary advances done at the mechanical, electronics, and robotics end, and it lacks intuition to perform everyday life tasks. Recently, research on myoelectric control based on pattern recognition (PR) shows promising results with the aid of machine learning classifiers. Using the approach termed as EMG-PR, EMG signals are divided into analysis windows, and features are extracted for each window. These features are then fed to the machine learning classifiers as input. By offering multiple class movements and intuitive control, this method has the potential to power Prosthesis an amputated subject to perform everyday life movements. In this paper, we investigate the effect of the analysis window and feature selection on classification accuracy of different hand and wrist movements using time-domain features. We show that effective data preprocessing and optimum feature selection helps to improve the classification accuracy of hand movements. We use publicly available hand and wrist gesture dataset of 40 intact and 11 trans-radial amputated subjects for experimentation. Results computed using different classification algorithms show that the proposed preprocessing and features selection outperforms the baseline and achieve up to 98% classification accuracy for both intact and trans-radial subjects.