Knit Band Sensor for Myoelectric Control of Surface EMG-Based Prosthetic Hand

Surface electromyography (sEMG) sensor is widely used to operate a myoelectric prosthesis and it has been further developed for various applications. In this paper, a multi-channel sEMG knit band sensor is newly suggested to be worn easily by amputee for myoelectric prosthesis. The band sensor was fabricated by knitting the silver-plated conductive yarn for electrodes with the moisture-wicking technical yarn for the comfort, ultimately, to record eight-channel sEMG signals simultaneously. Several experiments were conducted to verify the performance of knit band sensor. The normalized correlation between the developed knitted electrodes and the disposable (Ag/AgCl) electrodes is very high (0.95) at the same muscular area. The average signal-to-noise ratio value of the knitted electrodes (17.91 dB) was higher than that of the disposable electrodes (13.30 dB). For the performances of motion classification, overall classification accuracy of the knitted electrodes (93.2%) was higher than that of the disposable (87.9%). These experimental results have supported that the developed knit band sensor was as effective as the disposable electrodes.