Gesture recognition through mechanomyogram signals: an adaptive framework for arm posture variability
File(s)Vaidyanthan IEEE JBHI 10 pp 2024.pdf (12.19 MB)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Wattanasiri, Panipat
Wilson, Samuel
Huo, Weiguang
Vaidyanathan, Ravi
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
In hand gesture recognition, classifying gestures across multiple arm postures is challenging due to the dynamic nature of muscle fibers and the need to capture muscle activity through electrical connections with the skin. This paper presents a gesture recognition architecture addressing the arm posture challenges using an unsupervised domain adaptation technique and a wearable mechanomyogram (MMG) device that does not require electrical contact with the skin. To deal with the transient characteristics of muscle activities caused by changing arm posture, Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) combined with Domain-Adversarial Convolutional Neural Networks (DACNN) were used to extract MMG features and classify hand gestures. DACNN was compared with supervised trained classifiers and shown to achieve consistent improvement in classification accuracies over multiple arm postures. With less than 5 minutes of setup time to record 20 examples per gesture in each arm posture, the developed method achieved an average prediction accuracy of 87.43% for classifying 5 hand gestures in the same arm posture and 64.29% across 10 different arm postures. When further expanding the MMG segmentation window from 200 ms to 600 ms to extract greater discriminatory information at the expense of longer response time, the intraposture and inter-posture accuracies increased to 92.32% and 71.75%. The findings demonstrate the capability of the proposed method to improve generalization throughout dynamic changes caused by arm postures during non-laboratory usages and the potential of MMG to be an alternative sensor with comparable performance to the widely used electromyogram (EMG) gesture recognition systems.
Date Issued
2025-04-01
Date Acceptance
2024-10-01
Citation
IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 2025, 29 (4), pp.2453-2462
ISSN
2168-2208
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Start Page
2453
End Page
2462
Journal / Book Title
IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics
Volume
29
Issue
4
Copyright Statement
Copyright © 2024 IEEE. This is the author’s accepted manuscript made available under a CC-BY licence in accordance with Imperial’s Research Publications Open Access policy (www.imperial.ac.uk/oa-policy)
License URL
Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/jbhi.2024.3483428
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2024-10-28