Advancing Muscle-Computer Interfaces with High-Density Electromyography

In this paper we present our results on using electromyographic (EMG) sensor arrays for finger gesture recognition. Sensing muscle activity allows to capture finger motion without placing sensors directly at the hand or fingers and thus may be used to build unobtrusive body-worn interfaces. We use an electrode array with 192 electrodes to record a high-density EMG of the upper forearm muscles. We present in detail a baseline system for gesture recognition on our dataset, using a naive Bayes classifier to discriminate the 27 gestures. We recorded 25 sessions from 5 subjects. We report an average accuracy of 90% for the within-session scenario, showing the feasibility of the EMG approach to discriminate a large number of subtle gestures. We analyze the effect of the number of used electrodes on the recognition performance and show the benefit of using high numbers of electrodes. Cross-session recognition typically suffers from electrode position changes from session to session. We present two methods to estimate the electrode shift between sessions based on a small amount of calibration data and compare it to a baseline system with no shift compensation. The presented methods raise the accuracy from 59% baseline accuracy to 75% accuracy after shift compensation. The dataset is publicly available.