Multi-Attention Feature Fusion Network for Accurate Estimation of Finger Kinematics From Surface Electromyographic Signals

Simultaneous and proportional control (SPC) based on surface electromyographic (sEMG) signals has led to a broad range of applications. However, due to the limitation in the generalization and stability of current machine learning algorithms, these methods can only estimate less than 15 simultaneuous and proportional (SP) categories of finger movement. In this article, a novel deep learning algorithm, named multiattention feature fusion network (MAFN), is proposed to estimate comprehensive finger movement (up to 28 categories SP movements) from sEMG signals. MAFN is based on the multihead attention mechanism, which adaptively extracts essential features for analyzing the joint angles from the extracted sEMG features. Furthermore, a real-time exponential smoothing algorithm is designed for further improvement of the prediction stability. MAFN was evaluated on 28 finger movements of 38 subjects in the Ninapro_db2 dataset, and benchmarked with the state-of-the-art methods, such as temporal convolutional network (TCN) and long short term memory network (LSTM). The results demonstrated that the average Pearson correlation coefficient, root mean squared error of MAFN (0.84 ± 0.03,0.09 ± 0.01) were significantly higher than those of TCN (0.52 ± 0.06,
p
< 0.001;0.16 ± 0.02,
p
< 0.001) and LSTM (0.62 ± 0.06,
p
< 0.001;0.13 ± 0.01,
p
< 0.001). These improvements led to more stable and accurate movement predictions. Additionally, the time delay and power consumption of MAFN when applied to sEMG signals on a portable device are only 83.4 ms and 3 W, which implies prospective commercial applications.