A power wheelchair controlled using hand gestures, a single sEMG sensor, and guided under-determined source signal separation

Surface Electromyographic signals (sEMG) find applications in many areas such as rehabilitation, prosthesis and human-machine interaction. Systems reliant on these muscle-generated electrical signals require some form of machine learning algorithm for recognition of specific patterns of muscle activity. Those systems vary in terms of the signal detection methods, the feature selection and the classification algorithm used, however, in all those cases, the use of multiple sensors is a constant requirement. In this paper, we present a power wheelchair control system that relies on a single sEMG sensor and a new technique for signature recognition called Guided Under-determined Source Signal Separation (GUSSS). Compared to other approaches in the literature, the proposed technique achieves comparable results even when using a simple distance classifier and a very small number of features.