A Classifier of Shoulder Movements for a Wearable EMG-Based Device

Prostheses and exoskeletons need a control system able to rapidly understand user intentions; a noninvasive method is to deploy a myoelectric system, and a pattern recognition method to classify the intended movement to input to the controller. Here we focus on the classification phase. Our first aim is to recognize nine movements of the shoulder, a body part seldom considered in the literature and difficult to treat since the muscles involved are deep. We show that our novel sEMG two-phase classifier, working on a signal window of 500ms with 62ms increment, has a 97.7% accuracy for nine movements and about 100% accuracy on five movements. After developing the classifier using professionally collected sEMG data from eight channels, our second aim is to implement the classifier on a wearable device, composed by the Intel Edison board and a three-channel experimental portable acquisition board. Our final aim is to develop a complete classifier for dynamic situations, considering the transitions between move...