An sEMG-Based Human-Exoskeleton Interface Fusing Convolutional Neural Networks With Hand-Crafted Features

Abstract

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In recent years, the human-robot interfaces (HRIs) based on surface electromyography (sEMG) have been widely used in lower-limb exoskeleton robots for movement prediction during rehabilitation training for patients with hemiplegia. However, accurate and efficient lower-limb movement prediction for patients with hemiplegia remains a challenge due to complex movement information and individual differences. Traditional movement prediction methods usually use hand-crafted features, which are computationally cheap but can only extract some shallow heuristic information. Deep learning-based methods have a stronger feature expression ability, but it is easy to fall into the dilemma of local features, resulting in poor generalization performance of the method. In this article, a human-exoskeleton interface fusing convolutional neural networks with hand-crafted features is proposed. On the basis of our previous study, a lower-limb movement prediction framework (HCSNet) in patients with hemiplegia is constructed by fusing time and frequency domain hand-crafted features and channel synergy learning-based features. An sEMG data acquisition experiment is designed to compare and analyze the effectiveness of HCSNet. Experimental results show that the method can achieve 95.93 and 90.37% prediction accuracy in both within-subject and cross-subject cases, respectively. Compared with related lower-limb movement prediction methods, the proposed method has better prediction performance.

Keywords

• human-robot interfaces
• surface electromyography
• lower limb movement prediction
• feature fusion
• hemiplegia rehabilitation training