Continuous motion decoding from EMG using independent component analysis and adaptive model training

Surface Electromyography (EMG) is popularly used to decode human motion intention for robot movement control. Traditional motion decoding method uses pattern recognition to provide binary control command which can only move the robot as predefined limited patterns. In this work, we proposed a motion decoding method which can accurately estimate 3-dimensional (3-D) continuous upper limb motion only from multi-channel EMG signals. In order to prevent the muscle activities from motion artifacts and muscle crosstalk which especially obviously exist in upper limb motion, the independent component analysis (ICA) was applied to extract the independent source EMG signals. The motion data was also transferred from 4-manifold to 2-manifold by the principle component analysis (PCA). A hidden Markov model (HMM) was proposed to decode the motion from the EMG signals after the model trained by an adaptive model identification process. Experimental data were used to train the decoding model and validate the motion decoding performance. By comparing the decoded motion with the measured motion, it is found that the proposed motion decoding strategy was feasible to decode 3-D continuous motion from EMG signals.