DEVELOPMENT AND RESEARCH OF THE METHOD OF VECTOR ANALYSIS OF EMG OF THE FOREARM FOR CONSTRUCTION OF HUMAN-MACHINE INTERFACES

Abstract

The paper deals with the problems of increasing the depth and increasing the long-term stability
of communication channels in human-machine interfaces, built on the basis of data on the
electrical activity of the forearm muscles. A possible solution is to use the method of analysis of
electromyogram (EMG) signals, which combines vector and command control. In view of the possibility
of random displacement of the position of the electrodes during operation, a mathematical
model was built for vector analysis of EMG in spherical coordinates, which is invariant to the
spatial arrangement of the electrodes on the forearm. Command control is based on gesture
recognition by means of a pretrained artificial neural network (ANN). Vector control consists in
solving the problem of calibrating the channels of EMG sensors according to the spatial arrangement
of the electrodes and calculating the resulting vector of muscle forces used as an additional
information channel to set the direction of movement of the operating point of the control object.
The proposed method has been tested on actually recorded EMG signals. The influence of the
duration of the processed signal fragments on the process of extracting information about the
rotational movement of the hand was investigated. Since the change in the position of the electrodes
between operating sessions is different, an algorithm for reassigning and calibrating the
amplification of the EMG channels is presented, which makes it possible to use a once trained
ANN for recognition and classification of gestures in the future. Practical application of the results
of the work is possible in the development of algorithms for calibration, gesture recognition
and control of technical objects based on electromyographic human-machine interfaces.