Reducing the effect of wrist variation on pattern recognition of Myoelectric Hand Prostheses Control through Dynamic Time Warping

For upper limb prostheses, research carried out earlier mainly focused on increasing the classification accuracy of the hand movements; but there exist a little work done on factors affecting it in real-time control such as wrist variation. Amputees with functional wrist use their prostheses in multiple wrist positions. Since the Electromyography (EMG) data is taken while the subject is performing the motion in different wrist position, it can degrade the performance of the Pattern Recognition (PR) system. In this work, a wrist independent PR scheme has been developed. In this regard, Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is used to overcome the effects due to wrist variation. The performance of the DTW scheme as a PR system is validated using two training methods; with classification accuracy as a performance measure on data taken from the database of ten intact subjects for six hand motions carried out at three different wrist orientations. On the database, an average classification accuracy of about 93.3% was obtained while trained using EMG data from all possible wrist positions. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated in terms of classification accuracy and processing time when compared with the Time-domain power spectral descriptors (TD-PSD) method which outperformed other methods in the literature for reducing the impact of wrist variation on EMG based PR. The results show that the DTW can be a computationally cheap and accurate PR system for real-time hand movement classification.