Decoding Arm Movements by Myoelectric Signal and Artificial Neural Networks.docVIP

Intelligent Control and Automation, 2013, 4, 87-93 /10.4236/ica.2013.41012 Published Online February 2013 (/journal/ica) Decoding Arm Movements by Myoelectric Signal and Artificial Neural Networks Alexandre Balbinot, Adalberto Schuck Júnior, Gabriela Winkler Favieiro Department of Electrical Engineering, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil Email: alexandre.balbinot@ufrgs.br, aulaeng@ Received September 22, 2012; revised October 22, 2012; accepted October 30, 2012 ABSTRACT The scientific researches in the field of rehabilitation engineering are increasingly providing mechanisms in order to help people with disability to perform simple tasks of day-to-day. Several studies have been carried out highlighting the advantages of using muscle signal in order to control rehabilitation devices, such as experimental prostheses. This paper presents a study investigating the use of forearm surface electromyography (sEMG) signals for classification of several movements of the arm using just three pairs of surface electrodes located in strategic places. The classification is done by an artificial neural network to process signal features to recognize performed movements. The average accuracy reached for the classification of six different movements was 68% - 88%. Keywords: Surface Electromyography (sEMG); Artificial Neural Network (ANN); Assistive Technology; Prosthesis 1. Introduction jects to verify the feasibility and performance of different algorithms for pattern recognition using EMG signals from the forearm muscles [5-15]. In these studies are us- ually employed a high number of electrode pairs, ranging for 4 to 12. Using classification patterns techniques such as LDA [5], fuzzy logic [4,7-9,15], artificial neural net- works [16], among others, was found high accuracies (90%) for the classification of different moves [4-10]. This suggests that it is possible to achieve high accuracy using several