Classification of hand gestures from forearm electromyogram signatures from support vector machine

Robotic prosthetics is increasingly adopted as an enabling technology for amputees. These are vital not only for activities of daily living but to display expression and affection. A vital element to this system is an intelligent model that can identify signatures from the remaining limb that can be mapped to specific effector movements. Therefore, the study proposes the use of forearm electromyogram to classify between different types of hand gestures; fingers spread, wave out, wave in, fist, double tap, and relaxed state. Data are acquired from 32 subjects using Myo armband. Initially, a total of 248 time-and frequency-domain features are extracted from the eight-channel device. Neighborhood component analysis has reduced them to a total of fourteen features. A hand gesture classification model based on electromyogram signal has been successfully developed using support vector machine with overall accuracy of 97.4% for training, and 88.0% for testing.