Gait Cycle-Inspired Learning Strategy for Continuous Prediction of Knee Joint Trajectory from sEMG

Predicting lower limb motion intent is vital for controlling exoskeleton robots and prosthetic limbs. Surface electromyography (sEMG) attracts increasing attention in recent years as it enables ahead-of-time prediction of motion intentions before actual movement. However, the estimation performance of human joint trajectory remains a challenging problem due to the inter- and intra-subject variations. The former is related to physiological differences (such as height and weight) and preferred walking patterns of individuals, while the latter is mainly caused by irregular and gait-irrelevant muscle activity. This paper proposes a model integrating two gait cycle-inspired learning strategies to mitigate the challenge for predicting human knee joint trajectory. The first strategy is to decouple knee joint angles into motion patterns and amplitudes former exhibit low variability while latter show high variability among individuals. By learning through separate network entities, the model manages to capture both the common and personalized gait features. In the second, muscle principal activation masks are extracted from gait cycles in a prolonged walk. These masks are used to filter out components unrelated to walking from raw sEMG and provide auxiliary guidance to capture more gait-related features. Experimental results indicate that our model could predict knee angles with the average root mean square error (RMSE) of 3.03(0.49) degrees and 50ms ahead of time. To our knowledge this is the best performance in relevant literatures that has been reported, with reduced RMSE by at least 9.5%

An Attention-based Bidirectional LSTM Model for Continuous Cross-subject Estimation of Knee Joint Angle during Running from sEMG Signals

Running is an essential locomotion activity that plays a critical role in everyday life and exercise activities and may be impeded by joint disease and neurological impairments. Accurate and robust estimation of joint kinematics via surface electromyogram (sEMG) signals provides a human-machine interaction-based method that can be used to adequately control rehabilitation robots while performing complex movements such as running for motor function restoration in affected persons. To this end, this paper proposes a novel deep learning-based model (AM-BiLSTM) that integrates an attention mechanism (AM) and a bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) network. The proposed method was evaluated using knee joint kinematic and sEMG signals of fourteen subjects who performed running at 2 m/s speed. The proposed model’s generalizability was tested for within- and cross-subject scenarios and compared with standard LSTM and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) networks in terms of normalized root-mean-square error and correlation coefficient evaluation metrics. Based on the statistical tests, the proposed AM-BiLSTM model significantly outperformed the LSTM and MLP methods in both within- and cross-subject scenarios (p<0.05) and achieved state-of-the-art performance. © 20XX IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works

Boosting Personalised Musculoskeletal Modelling with Physics-informed Knowledge Transfer

Data-driven methods have become increasingly more prominent for musculoskeletal modelling due to their conceptually intuitive simple and fast implementation. However, the performance of a pre-trained data-driven model using the data from specific subject(s) may be seriously degraded when validated using the data from a new subject, hindering the utility of the personalised musculoskeletal model in clinical applications. This paper develops an active physics-informed deep transfer learning framework to enhance the dynamic tracking capability of the musculoskeletal model on the unseen data. The salient advantages of the proposed framework are twofold: 1) For the generic model, physics-based domain knowledge is embedded into the loss function of the data-driven model as soft constraints to penalise/regularise the data-driven model. 2) For the personalised model, the parameters relating to the feature extraction will be directly inherited from the generic model, and only the parameters relating to the subject-specific inference will be finetuned by jointly minimising the conventional data prediction loss and the modified physics-based loss. In this paper, we use the synchronous muscle forces and joint kinematics prediction from surface electromyogram (sEMG) as the exemplar to illustrate the proposed framework. Moreover, convolutional neural network (CNN) is employed as the deep neural network to implement the proposed framework, and the physics law between muscle forces and joint kinematics is utilised as the soft constraints. Results of comprehensive experiments on a self-collected dataset from eight healthy subjects indicate the effectiveness and great generalization of the proposed framework.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2207.0143

A Physics-Informed Low-Shot Learning For sEMG-Based Estimation of Muscle Force and Joint Kinematics

Muscle force and joint kinematics estimation from surface electromyography (sEMG) are essential for real-time biomechanical analysis of the dynamic interplay among neural muscle stimulation, muscle dynamics, and kinetics. Recent advances in deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown the potential to improve biomechanical analysis in a fully automated and reproducible manner. However, the small sample nature and physical interpretability of biomechanical analysis limit the applications of DNNs. This paper presents a novel physics-informed low-shot learning method for sEMG-based estimation of muscle force and joint kinematics. This method seamlessly integrates Lagrange's equation of motion and inverse dynamic muscle model into the generative adversarial network (GAN) framework for structured feature decoding and extrapolated estimation from the small sample data. Specifically, Lagrange's equation of motion is introduced into the generative model to restrain the structured decoding of the high-level features following the laws of physics. And a physics-informed policy gradient is designed to improve the adversarial learning efficiency by rewarding the consistent physical representation of the extrapolated estimations and the physical references. Experimental validations are conducted on two scenarios (i.e. the walking trials and wrist motion trials). Results indicate that the estimations of the muscle forces and joint kinematics are unbiased compared to the physics-based inverse dynamics, which outperforms the selected benchmark methods, including physics-informed convolution neural network (PI-CNN), vallina generative adversarial network (GAN), and multi-layer extreme learning machine (ML-ELM).Comment: 17 pages, 8 Figure

Deep Learning Based Abnormal Gait Classification System Study with Heterogeneous Sensor Network

Gait is one of the important biological characteristics of the human body. Abnormal gait is mostly related to the lesion site and has been demonstrated to play a guiding role in clinical research such as medical diagnosis and disease prevention. In order to promote the research of automatic gait pattern recognition, this paper introduces the research status of abnormal gait recognition and systems analysis of the common gait recognition technologies. Based on this, two gait information extraction methods, sensor-based and vision-based, are studied, including wearable system design and deep neural network-based algorithm design. In the sensor-based study, we proposed a lower limb data acquisition system. The experiment was designed to collect acceleration signals and sEMG signals under normal and pathological gaits. Specifically, wearable hardware-based on MSP430 and upper computer software based on Labview is designed. The hardware system consists of EMG foot ring, high-precision IMU and pressure-sensitive intelligent insole. Data of 15 healthy persons and 15 hemiplegic patients during walking were collected. The classification of gait was carried out based on sEMG and the average accuracy rate can reach 92.8% for CNN. For IMU signals five kinds of abnormal gait are trained based on three models: BPNN, LSTM, and CNN. The experimental results show that the system combined with the neural network can classify different pathological gaits well, and the average accuracy rate of the six-classifications task can reach 93%. In vision-based research, by using human keypoint detection technology, we obtain the precise location of the key points through the fusion of thermal mapping and offset, thus extracts the space-time information of the key points. However, the results show that even the state-of-the-art is not good enough for replacing IMU in gait analysis and classification. The good news is the rhythm wave can be observed within 2 m, which proves that the temporal and spatial information of the key points extracted is highly correlated with the acceleration information collected by IMU, which paved the way for the visual-based abnormal gait classification algorithm.步态指人走路时表现出来的姿态，是人体重要生物特征之一。异常步态多与病变部位有关，作为反映人体健康状况和行为能力的重要特征，其被论证在医疗诊断、疾病预防等临床研究中具有指导作用。为了促进步态模式自动识别的研究，本文介绍了异常步态识别的研究现状，系统地分析了常见步态识别技术以及算法，以此为基础研究了基于传感器与基于视觉两种步态信息提取方法，内容包括可穿戴系统设计与基于深度神经网络的算法设计。 在基于传感器的研究中，本工作开发了下肢步态信息采集系统，并利用该信息采集系统设计实验，采集正常与不同病理步态下的加速度信号与肌电信号，搭建深度神经网络完成分类任务。具体的，在系统搭建部分设计了基于MSP430的可穿戴硬件设备以及基于Labview的上位机软件，该硬件系统由肌电脚环，高精度IMU以及压感智能鞋垫组成，该上位机软件接收、解包蓝牙数据并计算出步频步长等常用步态参数。 在基于运动信号与基于表面肌电的研究中，采集了15名健康人与15名偏瘫病人的步态数据，并针对表面肌电信号训练卷积神经网络进行帕金森步态的识别与分类，平均准确率可达92.8%。针对运动信号训练了反向传播神经网络，LSTM以及卷积神经网络三种模型进行五种异常步态的分类任务。实验结果表明，本工作中步态信息采集系统结合神经网络模型，可以很好地对不同病理步态进行分类，六分类平均正确率可达93%。 在基于视觉的研究中，本文利用人体关键点检测技术，首先检测出图片中的一个或多个人，接着对边界框做图像分割，接着采用全卷积resnet对每一个边界框中的人物的主要关节点做热力图并分析偏移量，最后通过热力图与偏移的融合得到关键点的精确定位。通过该算法提取了不同步态下姿态关键点时空信息，为基于视觉的步态分析系统提供了基础条件。但实验结果表明目前最高准确率的人体关键点检测算法不足以替代IMU实现步态分析与分类。但在2m之内可以观察到节律信息，证明了所提取的关键点时空信息与IMU采集的加速度信息呈现较高相关度，为基于视觉的异常步态分类算法铺平了道路

Surface Electromyography and Artificial Intelligence for Human Activity Recognition - A Systematic Review on Methods, Emerging Trends Applications, Challenges, and Future Implementation

Human activity recognition (HAR) has become increasingly popular in recent years due to its potential to meet the growing needs of various industries. Electromyography (EMG) is essential in various clinical and biological settings. It is a metric that helps doctors diagnose conditions that affect muscle activation patterns and monitor patients’ progress in rehabilitation, disease diagnosis, motion intention recognition, etc. This review summarizes the various research papers based on HAR with EMG. Over recent years, the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has catalyzed remarkable advancements in the classification of biomedical signals, with a particular focus on EMG data. Firstly, this review meticulously curates a wide array of research papers that have contributed significantly to the evolution of EMG-based activity recognition. By surveying the existing literature, we provide an insightful overview of the key findings and innovations that have propelled this field forward. It explore the various approaches utilized for preprocessing EMG signals, including noise reduction, baseline correction, filtering, and normalization, ensure that the EMG data is suitably prepared for subsequent analysis. In addition, we unravel the multitude of techniques employed to extract meaningful features from raw EMG data, encompassing both time-domain and frequency-domain features. These techniques are fundamental to achieving a comprehensive characterization of muscle activity patterns. Furthermore, we provide an extensive overview of both Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) classification methods, showcasing their respective strengths, limitations, and real-world applications in recognizing diverse human activities from EMG signals. In examining the hardware infrastructure for HAR with EMG, the synergy between hardware and software is underscored as paramount for enabling real-time monitoring. Finally, we also discovered open issues and future research direction that may point to new lines of inquiry for ongoing research toward EMG-based detection.publishedVersio

LS-SVM Combined with ZNN for Predicting the Continuous Motion Joint Angle of Lower Limb

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A Physics-Informed Low-Shot Adversarial Learning For sEMG-Based Estimation of Muscle Force and Joint Kinematics

Muscle force and joint kinematics estimation from surface electromyography (sEMG) are essential for real-time biomechanical analysis of the dynamic interplay among neural muscle stimulation, muscle dynamics, and kinetics. Recent advances in deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown the potential to improve biomechanical analysis in a fully automated and reproducible manner. However, the small sample nature and physical interpretability of biomechanical analysis limit the applications of DNNs. This paper presents a novel physics-informed low-shot adversarial learning method for sEMG-based estimation of muscle force and joint kinematics. This method seamlessly integrates Lagrange?s equation of motion and inverse dynamic muscle model into the generative adversarial network (GAN) framework for structured feature decoding and extrapolated estimation from the small sample data. Specifically, Lagrange?s equation of motion is introduced into the generative model to restrain the structured decoding of the high-level features following the laws of physics. A physics-informed policy gradient is designed to improve the adversarial learning efficiency by rewarding the consistent physical representation of the extrapolated estimations and the physical references. Experimental validations are conducted on two scenarios (i.e. the walking trials and wrist motion trials). Results indicate that the estimations of the muscle forces and joint kinematics are unbiased compared to the physics-based inverse dynamics, which outperforms the selected benchmark methods, including physics-informed convolution neural network (PI-CNN), vallina generative adversarial network (GAN), and multi-layer extreme learning machine (ML-ELM)