An end-to-end hand action recognition framework based on cross-time mechanomyography signals

Abstract

The susceptibility of mechanomyography (MMG) signals acquisition to sensor donning and doffing, and the apparent time-varying characteristics of biomedical signals collected over different periods, inevitably lead to a reduction in model recognition accuracy. To investigate the adverse effects on the recognition results of hand actions, a 12-day cross-time MMG data collection experiment with eight subjects was conducted by an armband, then a novel MMG-based hand action recognition framework with densely connected convolutional networks (DenseNet) was proposed. In this study, data from 10 days were selected as a training subset, and the remaining data from another 2 days were used as a test set to evaluate the model’s performance. As the number of days in the training set increases, the recognition accuracy increases and becomes more stable, peaking when the training set includes 10 days and achieving an average recognition rate of 99.57% (± 0.37%). In addition, part of the training subset is extracted and recombined into a new dataset and the better classification performances of models can be achieved from the test set. The method proposed effectively mitigates the adverse effects of sensor donning and doffing on recognition results.