Application of Context-dependent Interpretation of Biosignals Recognition to Control a Bionic Multifunctional Hand Prosthesis

The paper presents an original method for controlling a surface-electromyography-driven (sEMG) prosthesis. A context-dependent recognition system is proposed in which the same class of sEMG signals may have a different interpretation, depending on the context. This allowed the repertoire of performed movements to be increased. The proposed structure of the context-dependent recognition system includes unambiguously defined decision sequences covering the overall action of the prosthesis, i.e. the so-called boxes. Because the boxes are mutually isolated environments, each box has its own interpretation of the recognition result, as well as a separate local-recognition-task-focused classifier. Due to the freedom to assign contextual meanings to classes of biosignals, the construction procedure of the classifier can be optimised in terms of the local classification quality in a given box or the classification quality of the entire system. In the paper, two optimisation problems are formulated, differing in the adopted constraints on optimisation variables, with the methods of solving the problems based on an exhaustive search and an evolutionary algorithm, being developed. Experimental studies were conducted using signals from 1 able-bodied person with simulation of amputation and 10 volunteers with transradial amputations. The study compared the classical recognition system and the context-dependent system for various classifier models. An unusual testing strategy was adopted in the research, taking into account the specificity of the considered recognition task, with two original quality measures resulting from this scheme then being applied. The results obtained confirm the hypothesis that the application of the context-dependent classifier led to an improvement in classification quality.