Motor imagery classification of upper limb movements based on spectral domain features of EEG patterns

Surface electromyography pattern recognition methods have been widely applied to decode limb movement intentions for prosthesis control. These methods generally require amputees to provide sufficient myoelectric signals from their residual limb muscles. Previous studies have shown that amputees with high level amputation or neuromuscular disorder usually do not have sufficient residual limb muscles to provide enough myoelectric signals for accurate identification of limb movements. Electroencephalography (EEG), another bioelectric signal associated with limb movements has also been proposed and used for decoding the limb motion intents of humans. With an attempt to improve the performance of EEG-based method in identifying multiple classes of upper limb movement intents, four spectral domain features of EEG were proposed in this study. Motor imagery patterns associated with five different classes of imagined upper limb movements were distinctively decoded based on the four features extracted from 64-channel EEG recordings in four transhumeral amputees. Experimental results show that an average accuracy of 97.81% was achieved across all the subjects and limb movement classes. By applying a sequential channel selection method, an accuracy of around 95.00% was realized with about 20-channels of EEG. Thus, the proposed method might be potential for providing accurate control input for neuroprosthesis.