Recognition of additional myo armband gestures for myoelectric prosthetic applications

Abstract

Myoelectric prostheses are a viable solution for people with amputations. The challenge in implementing a usable myoelectric prosthesis lies in accurately recognizing different hand gestures. The current myoelectric devices usually implement very few hand gestures. In order to approximate a real hand functionality, a myoelectric prosthesis should implement a large number of hand and finger gestures. However, increasing number of gestures can lead to a decrease in recognition accuracy. In this work a Myo arm band device is used to recognize fourteen gestures (five build in gestures of Myo armband in addition to nine new gestures). The data in this research is collected from three body-able subjects for a period of 7 seconds per gesture. The proposed method uses a pattern recognition technique based on Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural Network (MLPNN). The results show an average accuracy of 90.5% in recognizing the proposed fourteen gestures.