Support vectors machine classification of surface electromyography for non-invasive naturally controlled hand prostheses.

The scientific researches in human rehabilitation techniques have continually evolved to offer again the mobility and freedom lost to disability. Many systems managed by myoelectric signals intended to mimic the movement of the human arm still have results considered partial, which makes it subject of many researches. The use of Natural Interfaces Signal Processing methods makes possible to design systems capable of offering prosthesis in a more natural and intuitive way. This paper presents a study investigating the use of forearm surface electromyography (sEMG) signals for classification of specific movements of hand using 12 sEMG channels and support vector machine (SVM). The system acquired the sEMG signal using a virtual model as a visual stimulus in order to demonstrate to the volunteer the hand movements which must be replicated by them. The Root Mean Square (RMS) value feature is extracted of the signal and it serves as input data for the classification with SVM. The classification stage used three types of kernel functions (linear, polynomial, radial basis) for comparison of the results. The average accuracy reached for the classification of seventeen distinct movements of 83.7% was achieved using the SVM linear classifier, 80.8% was achieved using the SVM polynomial classifier and 85.1% was achieved using the SVM radial basis classifier.