ICORR2017 paper selected for best poster competition

The ICORR 2017 submission ‘Repeatability of grasp recognition for robotic hand prosthesis control based on sEMG data’ by Francesca Palermo et al. was selected for the Rehabweek Best poster completion.

The IEEE International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics (ICORR) 2017 will take place from July 17-20 in London, UK.

Abstract

Control methods based on sEMG obtained promising results for hand prosthetics. Control system robustness is still often inadequate and does not allow the amputees to perform a large number of movements useful for everyday life. Only few studies analyzed the repeatability of sEMG classification of hand grasps. The main goals of this paper are to explore repeatability in sEMG data and to release a repeatability database with the recorded experiments. The data are recorded from 10 intact subjects repeating 7 grasps 12 times, twice a day for 5 days. The data are publicly available on the Ninapro web page. The analysis for the repeatability is based on the comparison of movement classification accuracy in several data acquisitions and for different subjects. The analysis is performed using mean absolute value and waveform length features and a Random Forest classifier. The accuracy obtained by training and testing on acquisitions at different times is on average 27.03% lower than training and testing on the same acquisition. The results obtained by training and testing on different acquisitions suggest that previous acquisitions can be used to train the classification algorithms. The inter-subject variability is remarkable, suggesting that specific characteristics of the subjects can affect repeatability and sEMG classification accuracy. In conclusion, the results of this paper can contribute to developing more robust control systems for hand prostheses, while the presented data allows researchers to test repeatability in further analyses.