Effect of the sEMG electrode (re)placement and feature set size on the hand movement recognition

Repositioning of recording electrode array across repeated electromyography measurements may result in a displacement error in hand movement classification systems. In order to examine if the classifier re-training could reach satisfactory results when electrode array is translated along or rotated around subject's forearm for varying number of features, we recorded surface electromyography signals in 10 healthy volunteers for three types of grasp and 6 wrist movements. For feature extraction we applied principal component analysis and the feature set size varied from one to 8 principal components. We compared results of re-trained classifier with results from leave-one-out cross-validation classification procedure for three classifiers: LDA (Linear Discriminant Analysis), QDA (Quadratic Discriminant Analysis), and ANN (Artificial Neural Network). Our results showed that there was no significant difference in classification accuracy when the array electrode was repositioned indicating successful classification re-training and optimal feature set selection. The results also indicate expectedly that the number of principal components plays a key role for acceptable classification accuracy ∼90%. For the largest dataset (9 hand movements), LDA and QDA outperformed ANN, while for three grasping movements ANN showed promising results. Interestingly, we showed that interaction between electrode array position and the feature set size is not statistically significant. This study emphasizes the importance of testing the interaction of factors that influence classification accuracy and classifier selection altogether with their impact independently in order to establish guiding principles for design of hand movement recognition system. Data recorded for this study are stored on Zenodo repository (doi: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4039550).