Combining Independent Component and Grey Relational Analysis for the Real-Time System of Hand Motion Identification Using Bend Sensors and Multichannel Surface EMG

This paper proposes a portable system for hand motion identification (HMI) using the features from data glove with bend sensors and multichannel surface electromyography (SEMG). SEMG could provide the information of muscle activities indirectly for HMI. However it is difficult to discriminate the finger motion like extension of thumb and little finger just using SEMG; the data glove with five bend sensors is designed to detect finger motions in the proposed system. Independent component analysis (ICA) and grey relational analysis (GRA) are used to data reduction and the core of identification, respectively. Six features are extracted from each SEMG channel, and three features are computed from five bend sensors in the data glove. To test the feasibility of the system, this study quantitatively compares the classification accuracies of twenty hand motions collected from 10 subjects. Compared to the performance with a back-propagation neural network and only using GRA method, the proposed method provides equivalent accuracy (>85%) with three training sets and faster processing time (20 ms). The results also demonstrate that ICA can effectively reduce the size of input features with GRA methods and, in turn, reduce the processing time with the low price of reduced identification rates.