Towards Personalized Myoelectric Control Strategies

This work aims to revise and pilot test some of the most popular myoelectric control approaches for assistive robotic devices, with the objective of showing that, when it comes to the impaired population, different myoelectric control strategies may result in different behaviours. In particular, we show that the way we use myoelectric signals to provide commands to the robot plays a fundamental role: different strategies may lead to statistically different behaviors of the coupled human-robot system. These results open up the perspective of investigating optimal patient-specific myoelectric control strategies to make myoelectric interfaces actually usable and acceptable by a greater number of patients, including subjects with muscular dystrophy.