Feasibility Study of Advanced Neural Networks Applied to sEMG-Based Force Estimation.

Journal: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
PMID:

Abstract

To find out the feasibility of different neural networks in sEMG-based force estimation, in this paper, three types of networks, namely convolutional neural network (CNN), long short-term memory (LSTM) network and their combination (C-LSTM) were applied to predict muscle force generated in static isometric elbow flexion across three different circumstances (multi-subject, subject-dependent and subject-independent). Eight healthy men were recruited for the experiments, and the results demonstrated that all the three models were applicable for force estimation, and LSTM and C-LSTM achieved better performances. Even under subject-independent situation, they maintained mean RMSE% of as low as 9.07 ± 1.29 and 8.67 ± 1.14. CNN turned out to be a worse choice, yielding a mean RMSE% of 12.13 ± 1.98. To our knowledge, this work was the first to employ CNN, LSTM and C-LSTM in sEMG-based force estimation, and the results not only prove the strength of the proposed networks, but also pointed out a potential way of achieving high accuracy in real-time, subject-independent force estimation.

Authors

  • Lingfeng Xu
    Department of Electronic Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230027, China. xlfustc@mail.ustc.edu.cn.
  • Xiang Chen
    Yangtze Delta Region Institute (Huzhou), University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Huzhou, Zhejiang, China.
  • Shuai Cao
    Department of Electronic Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230027, China. caoshuai@ustc.edu.cn.
  • Xu Zhang
    China CDC Key Laboratory of Environment and Population Health, National Institute of Environmental Health, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Beijing 100021, China.
  • Xun Chen
    Department of Electronic Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230027, China. xunchen@ece.ubc.ca.