Real-time classification of forearm movements based on high density surface electromyography

Partial or complete loss of the upper limb motor function has great impact on the activities of daily life (ADL) of post-stroke survivors. To improve the rehabilitation effect of fine motor function of forearms, a couple of recent studies focused on methods that try to decode the limb motion intent of patients through physical exercises. However, there exist a few studies on real-time active rehabilitation method for the classification of multiple hand movements. In the current investigate, a pattern-recognition based rehabilitation environment was set up using high-density surface electromyogram (HD-sEMG) and the real-time classification performance of 21 forearm motions was investigated with eight healthy subjects. The results showed that the average motion completion rate across all subjects was 91.17% + 2.86%, which suggests the potential of intention-initiated approach in assistive rehabilitation technique.