Background: For the functional control of prosthetic hand, it is insufficient to obtain only the motion pattern information. As far as practicality is concerned, the control of the prosthetic hand force is indispensable. The application value of prosthetic hand will be greatly improved if the stable grip of prosthetic hand can be achieved. To address this problem, in this study, a bio-signal control method for grasping control of a prosthetic hand is proposed to improve patient's sense of using prosthetic hand and the thus improving the quality of life.
Methods: A MYO gesture control armband is used to collect the surface electromyographic (sEMG) signals from the upper limb. The overlapping sliding window scheme are applied for data segmentation and the correlated features are extracted from each segmented data. Principal component analysis (PCA) methods are then deployed for dimension reduction. Deep neural network is used to generate sEMG-force regression model for force prediction at different levels. The predicted force values are input to a fuzzy controller for the grasping control of a prosthetic hand. A vibration feedback device is used to feed grasping force value back to patient's arm to improve patient's sense of using prosthetic hand and realize accurate grasping. To test the effectiveness of the scheme, 15 able-bodied subjects participated in the experiments.
Results: The classification results indicated that 8-channel sEMG applying all four time-domain features, with PCA reduction from 32 to 8 dimensions results in the highest classification accuracy. Based on the experimental results from 15 participants, the average recognition rate is over 95%. On the other hand, from the statistical results of standard deviation, the between-subject variations ranges from 3.58 to 1.25%, proving that the robustness and stability of the proposed approach.
Conclusions: The method proposed hereto control grasping power through the patient's own sEMG signal, which achieves a high recognition rate to improve the success rate of grip and increases the sense of operation and also brings the gospel for upper extremity amputation patients.
Keywords: DNN; Fuzzy controller; Grasp control; PCA; Prosthetic hand; Vibration feedback device; sEMG-force.