Assessment of EMG Benchmark Data for Gesture Recognition Using the NinaPro Database

In recent years, many electromyography (EMG) benchmark databases have been made publicly available to the myoelectric control research community. Many small laboratories that lack the instrumentation, access, and experience needed to collect quality EMG data have used these benchmark datasets to explore and propose new signal processing and pattern recognition algorithms. It is widely accepted that noise contamination can affect the performance of myoelectric control systems, and so useful datasets should maintain good signal quality to ensure accurate results for proposed EMG-based gesture recognition systems. Despite the availability and adoption of benchmarks datasets, however, the quality of the EMG signals in these benchmarks has not yet been examined. In this study, the signal quality of the Non-Invasive Adaptive Prosthetics (NinaPro) dataset, the most widely known publicly available benchmark database to date, was comprehensively investigated with the goals of: 1) reporting the level of noise contamination in each NinaPro sub-dataset, 2) proposing signal quality criteria for assessing EMG datasets, 3) analyzing the effect of signal quality on classification performance, and 4) examining the quality of the data labels.