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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON HUMAN-MACHINE SYSTEMS
Technical Correspondence
Myoelectric Pattern Recognition Based on Muscle Synergies for
Simultaneous Control of Dexterous Finger Movements
Shenquan Zhang, Xu Zhang, Shuai Cao, Xiaoping Gao, Xiang Chen, and Ping Zhou
Abstract—Motor activities during daily life always involve simultaneous
control of multiple degrees of freedom (DOFs), which has not yet been
fully explored in myoelectric control due to difficulty in sufficiently decod-
ing the complex neural control information. This study presents a novel
framework for simultaneous myoelectric control based on pattern recog-
nition incorporated with a muscle synergy motor control strategy for each
DOF. An experiment for discriminating 18 dexterous finger movement
tasks was designed to evaluate the performance of the framework for the
simultaneous control of 5 DOFs. Task discrimination was assessed with 18
neurologically intact subjects, and the framework exhibited high accuracy
(96.79% ±2.46%), outperforming three other methods, including the rou-
tine myoelectric pattern-recognition approach for conventional sequential
control (p<0.001). Furthermore, the feasibility of the proposed framework
is also demonstrated with data from paretic muscles of two stroke subjects.
This study offers a feasible solution for simultaneous myoelectric control
of multiple DOFs, which has great potential for natural implementation in
prosthetic hand devices and robotic training systems, especially for dexter-
ous finger movements.
Index Terms—Myoelectric pattern recognition, muscle synergy,
simultaneous control, stroke rehabilitation.
I. INTRODUCTION
M YOELECTRIC control is a technique that enables interpreta-
tion of movements or movement intentions as control com-
mands by recording and processing surface electromyography (EMG).
The method has been widely used in prosthetic control since the 1960s
[1], and it is used more generally as an input interface for human-
computer interaction [2], [3]. Myoelectric pattern recognition has been
developed as a useful strategy to enable control of multiple degrees
Manuscript received September 1, 2016; revised January 10, 2017; accepted
March 25, 2017. This work was supported in part by the National Natural
Science Foundation of China under Grant 61401421 and Grant 61431017, and
in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under
Grant WK2100230014. This paper was recommended by Associate Editor X.
Hu. (Corresponding author: Xu Zhang.)
S. Zhang, X. Zhang, S. Cao, and X. Chen are with the Department of
Electronic Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of
China, Hefei 230027, China (e-mail: zsq350@mail.ustc.edu.cn; xuzhang90@
ustc.edu.cn; caoshuai@mail.ustc.edu.cn; xch@ustc.edu.cn).
X. Gao is with the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, First Affil-
iated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, Hefei 230022, China (e-mail:
gxp678@163.com).
P. Zhou is with the Guangdong Work Injury Rehabilitation Center, Guangzhou
510440, China, and also with the Department of Physical Medicine and
Rehabilitation, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and
TIRR Memorial Hermann Research Center, Houston, TX 77030 USA (e-mail:
ping.zhou.1@uth.tmc.edu).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/THMS.2017.2700444
2168-2291 © 2017 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
1
of freedom (DOFs) for multifunctional use [4], especially for con-
trolling dexterous hand or finger movements [5], [6]. State-of-the-art
myoelectric controllers have been reported to support the control of
more than 4 DOFs in total [5]–[8]. However, one main limitation of
the pattern-recognition-based control strategy is its sequential selection
of different DOFs or task patterns. This contrasts sharply with natu-
ral motor control, which is based on simultaneous control of multiple
DOFs [7].
Many studies have recently been conducted on simultaneous control,
and some have reported promising results [9], [10]. The concept of mus-
cle synergy has been employed in myoelectric control methods by many
recent studies to decode neural control information. Muscle synergy is
mathematically described as a vector that specifies a pattern of relative
muscle activation with activation coefficients related to the strength of
motor drive from the central nervous system [11]. Any complex move-
ments can be formulated by multiple weighted combinations of muscle
synergies. Inspired by this idea, Jiang et al. made many achievements
in extracting simultaneous control information from surface EMG [9].
Ison and Artemiadis [11] also showed that muscle synergies extracted
from EMG can be used to promote intuitive myoelectric control.
Although enormous progress has been made in the simultaneous con-
trol of multiple DOFs in recent years, the number of simultaneously
activated DOFs is still limited to three [9]–[12]. A generative model
proposed by Jiang et al. [9] managed to control two DOFs simultane-
ously, but it turned out to be invalid when an additional third DOF was
included. Young et al. [12] reported a 4-DOF control approach under
the restriction that no more than 2 DOFs would be activated at the
same time. Recent efforts on simultaneous myoelectric control have
always involved upper-limb gross motor activities, such as hand clos-
ing/opening and extension/flexion of the wrist and elbow [9], [10], [12].
Investigations into simultaneous control of dexterous finger movements
remain insufficient due to the challenge that at least 5 DOFs need to be
decoded simultaneously.
In this paper, a novel framework for myoelectric simultaneous con-
trol of multiple DOFs is proposed to discriminate dexterous finger
movements. The activities of five fingers are processed separately to
control 5 DOFs, and the control of each DOF relies on myoelectric pat-
tern recognition incorporated with muscle synergies specific to the ac-
tivities of the corresponding finger. Surface EMG signals are recorded
via two flexible high-density electrode arrays placed over both fin-
ger extensors and flexors around the forearm. The discrimination of
18 tasks involving activities of any single finger or different finger
combinations was conducted to evaluate the performance of the pro-
posed framework.
This study is a part of our continuous efforts to explore the
application of myoelectric pattern recognition for neurological injury
patients (such as stroke, spinal cord injury, and cerebral palsy patients)
[13]–[15]. The results of the current study could not only benefit
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2 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON HUMAN-MACHINE SYSTEMS
Fig. 1. Electrode placement for 64-channel surface EMG signal recording
using two pieces of flexible high-density electrode arrays placed over both the
posterior and anterior sides of the forearm. The numbers in circles represent
indices of surface EMG channels. The uppercase letters and lowercase letters
denote the indices of rows and columns of the entire electrode array, respectively.
prosthetic users, but also advance dexterous robotic training for
neurological injury patients driven by simultaneous control of multiple
DOFs, which may have better therapeutic effects than passive training
or simple active training driven by conventional myoelectric control
[15]. The framework was tested on both neurologically intact subjects
and hemiparetic stroke survivors.
II. METHODS
A. Subjects
Participants in the data collection experiment comprised 18 neuro-
logically intact subjects (all male, 16 right-handed and 2 left-handed,
age 21–27 years) and two stroke subjects (both male, 45 and 54 years
old, both right-handed before stroke, 1 and 2 months since the on-
set of stroke, denoted as S1 and S2). The experiment was approved by
the institutional ethics review board. The stroke survivors suffered from
substantial hemiplegia on the right side of the body after either cerebral
infarction or cerebral hemorrhage. Their hand motor function scored
58 and 38 on the upper-extremity component of the Fugl–Meyer scale
(a total score of 66 represents full function) [16] and 5 and 2 on the
hand impairment part of the Chedoke–McMaster stroke assessment
scale (a full score of 7 represents full function) [17]. There was no
requirement for stroke subjects to be able to perform the tested tasks
using the affected hand. Written consent was obtained from all subjects
before the experiment.
B. Data Acquisition
The data acquisition experiment was performed on the dominant-
hand side of all neurologically intact subjects and the hemiparetic side
of both stroke subjects. Fig. 1 illustrates the placement of electrodes
over the right hand as an example. Two flexible high-density electrode
arrays were used to collect surface EMG data from finger extensors and
flexors on mainly the posterior and anterior sides around the forearm,
respectively. Each array consisted of 32 recording probes arranged in
Fig. 2. Illustration of the 18 finger movement tasks.
a 4 × 8 matrix. Each recording probe had a diameter of 3 mm, and the
center-to-center distance between two consecutive probes was 10 mm.
When placed over the forearm, both arrays constituted an entire array
in a 4 × 16 matrix, producing a total of 64 channels of EMG recordings
in a monopolar configuration. The second row of the entire array was
aligned around the maximal circumference around the forearm. A round
reference electrode was located on the olecranon of the same arm.
To facilitate signal collection during the experiment, a wide stretch-
able nylon belt was used as an armband over the electrode arrays to
prevent loose connections between the recording probes and the skin
surface. The surface EMG signals were recorded by a custom-made data
recording system capable of recording up to 128 channels at the same
time. Each surface EMG channel was processed by a two-stage ampli-
fier with a total gain of 60 dB, a built-in band-pass filter (20–500 Hz),
and digitalization at a sampling rate of 1000 Hz. The recorded data
were transferred and stored on a computer via USB cable. A software
package was also developed to monitor all the recorded EMG data on
the computer screen in real time.
C. Experimental Protocol
In the experiment, subjects were comfortably seated in a chair, and
their dominant arm was placed over a height-adjustable side table for
the test with shoulder abduction at 30°, elbow flexion at 90°, and slight
wrist pronation to allow the hand to be placed flat on the horizontal
surface of the table. The subject was instructed to perform 18 gesture
tasks involving the extension of different individual fingers or finger
combinations, as shown in Fig. 2. The experiment protocol comprised
18 trials. For each trial of the same task, the subject was guided by
an experimenter to start or terminate each of five repetitions in total.
The subject was required to perform (or intend to perform, especially
for both stroke subjects following substantial hemiparesis) a muscle
contraction with a mild to moderate force that just enables the activities
of specific fingers to be activated and maintained and to hold the task
for approximately 3 s. A sufficiently long rest period was allowed for
each subject between consecutive trials and repetitions to avoid muscle
fatigue.
D. Data Segmentation and Feature Extraction
The recorded EMG data showed five activity bursts corresponding
to five repetitions of each movement in one trial. Both the onset and
offset times of each repetition were straightforwardly determined using
a routine amplitude-thresholding approach [18]. Each detected data
segment corresponding to one repetition was further segmented into a
series of overlapped analysis windows with a window size of 256 ms
and a window increment of 32 ms. These analysis windows were also
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON HUMAN-MACHINE SYSTEMS
considered as basic data samples in the feature extraction and pattern
classification analyses.
The Hudgins’ feature set [4], [13] was used to extract four time-
domain (TD) parameters: the mean absolute value (MAV), wave-
form length (WL), number of zero-crossings (ZC), and number of
slope sign changes (SSC) from each EMG channel. This produced a
256-dimensional (4 × 64) feature vector for each data sample. The
reasons for adopting the TD feature set included its reported effective-
ness in EMG pattern recognition and low computational complexity.
Another reason was its nonnegative definition, which is very important
for the muscle synergy analysis [19], [20]. The features from all data
samples were further normalized to a range between 0 and 1 using the
min–max normalization [21].
E. Muscle Synergy Analysis
The muscle synergy model used in this paper is described as:
V m ×n = Wm ×r × Hr ×n
where Vm ×n denotes a group of n data samples (each represented in
an m-dimensional feature vector) arranged in a matrix form, W and
H denote the synergy matrix and the activation coefficient matrix,
respectively, and r(< m) is the number of extracted synergies. Given
V , the problem of determining both W and H is a typical blind source
separation problem. This problem was solved using nonnegative matrix
factorization due to its effectiveness in extracting muscle synergies [22].
F. Synergy-Based Classification for Simultaneous Control
All the examined tasks were regarded to be performed via five inde-
pendent DOFs corresponding to activities of the five fingers. For each
DOF, there are positive and negative states representing whether or not
the corresponding finger is extended. Therefore, the proposed frame-
work involved simultaneously identifying the states of five DOFs to
make a final decision for task discrimination. Within this framework, a
classification approach incorporated with muscle synergy information
was implemented as a classifier for each DOF.
Fig. 3 shows block diagrams of both the proposed simultaneous con-
trol framework and the synergy-based classifier for each DOF. Given
a set of synergies specific to a movement task, whether an unknown
data sample belongs to that task can be validated by how accurately the
encoding process can simulate the sample with those synergies. This
is regarded as the fundamental principle of the task-specific muscle-
synergy-based discrimination (MSD) method proposed by Rasool et
al. for EMG classification [23]. Accordingly, two versions of the MSD
method were implemented as classifiers at the individual DOF level,
thus producing two methods for simultaneous control in the current
study.
1) Threshold-Based Version of MSD for Simultaneous Con-
trol (MSDSC-1): When a single DOF was considered, movement
tasks were categorized by the positive and negative states into two pat-
terns: a positive pattern consisting of all tasks involving extension of
the finger corresponding to the considered DOF, and a negative pat-
tern consisting of other tasks. In the training phase as shown in Fig.
3, the training dataset Vp t r n consists of data samples from all tasks
belonging to the positive pattern. Muscle synergy analysis was then
performed on Vp t r n via (1) to obtain a synergy matrix Wp specific to
the positive pattern.
In the testing phase, given the constant Wp , an unknown testing
sample v was factorized to estimate the activation coefficient ĥp . The
reconstructed version of v was denoted as v̂p , which was calculated
as v̂p = Wp × ĥp . Next, the reconstruction residual was computed as
3
the Euclidean distance between v and v̂p . In the synergy-based EMG
classification, the distance was quite small when the data sample truly
belonged to the pattern considered (positive in this case). Therefore, it
is reasonable to make the decision about the DOF by comparing the
distance with a predefined threshold. The DOF is positive if the distance
is smaller than the threshold, and negative otherwise. The threshold
was determined based on the maximum classification accuracy with
the training dataset. Generally, these thresholds varied across DOFs.
2) Pattern Comparison Version of MSD for Simultaneous
Control (MSDSC-2): MSDSC-2 applies the same procedure as
MSDSC-1 to the negative pattern as well. In the training phase, the
training dataset Vn t r n was additionally formed and further decom-
posed via (1) to obtain Wn for the negative pattern. In the testing
phase, given an unknown testing sample v, two distance values dp
and dn were computed accordingly for both the positive and nega-
tive patterns. The lower distance indicated higher likelihood that the
data sample belonged to the corresponding pattern. Thus, the main
difference of this method from MSDSC-1 is replacing the threshold
(1)
by dn ; that is, the state is positive if dp is lower than dn , and negative
otherwise.
In muscle synergy analysis, the number of muscle synergies is a cru-
cial parameter that might affect the classification performance. A small
synergy number might not carry sufficient information, while one that
is too large would increase the calculation burden and even compro-
mise the performance. Therefore, the synergy number was varied from
3 to 25 to examine its effect on the classification performance using
both methods.
G. Performance Evaluation
The task discrimination was conducted in a user-specific manner.
Given five repetitions of each task during the data collection, a five-
fold cross-validation testing scheme was used to use the data efficiently.
The EMG data within any four repetitions were selected and assigned
for training classifiers, and the remaining EMG data were referred to
as the testing dataset. To quantify the classification performance, the
overall accuracy was defined by calculating the percentage ratio of the
number of correctly identified data samples to the number of all data
samples over five testing trials in total for each subject.
A linear discriminant classifier (LDC) was employed for perfor-
mance comparison. The LDC involves a linear discriminant analysis
(LDA) to enhance the class separability. A subsequent linear classifier
models the within-class density of each class as a multivariant Gaus-
sian distribution and gives decisions about unknown samples based on
maximum a posterior Bayesian estimation [13]. Specifically, a multi-
variate extension of LDA called uncorrected LDA [24] was adopted
due to the high dimension of feature vectors derived from high-density
surface EMG recordings. We implemented the LDC in two different
schemes. In one scheme, the LDC is embedded in the proposed simul-
taneous control framework (LDCSC) and works as a classifier at the
individual DOF level. The other allows us the LDC to work on TD fea-
tures directly, thus enabling conventional sequential control. The latter
scheme (LDC) has been adopted as a routine solution to myoelectric
pattern recognition with many successful applications [4], [5], [13].
Without the simultaneous control capability, LDC was used as a base-
line for evaluating the task discrimination accuracy between different
methods.
Two one-way repeated-measure analyses of variance (ANOVAs)
were applied to the overall accuracy obtained from 18 neurologically
intact subjects using both MSDSC-1 and MSDSC-2 methods to deter-
mine the appropriate synergy number (considered as the within-subject
factor ranging from 3 to 25). Another one-way repeated-measure
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4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON HUMAN-MACHINE SYSTEMS
Fig. 3. (a) Flowchart of the proposed framework for simultaneous myoelectric control of five DOFs. (b) Two versions of the muscle synergy-based myoelectric
pattern classifier implemented at each DOF level for simultaneous control (MSDSC-1 and MSDSC-2).
Fig. 4. Effect of synergy number on recognition accuracy using both MSDSC
methods. The accuracies are averaged across 18 neurologically intact subjects
and plotted with SD error bars.
ANOVA was applied to the overall accuracy with the classification
method (MSDSC-1, MSDSC-2, LDCSC, and LDC) considered as
within-subject factors. Post hoc pairwise multiple comparisons with
Bonferroni correction were used when necessary. The level of statis-
tical significance was set to p < 0.05 for all analyses. A prior power
analysis for the ANOVA was conducted to test the sample size using
PASS software (ver. 11.0, NASS LLC. Kaysville, UT), while all other
statistical analyses were completed using SPSS software (ver. 16.0,
SPSS Inc. Chicago, IL).
III. RESULTS
A. Synergy Number Determination
Fig. 4 shows the effect of synergy number on recognition accuracy
averaged across 18 neurologically intact subjects using both MSDSC-1
and MSDSC-2 methods. A very small synergy number led to relatively
low accuracies for both methods. When the synergy number was in-
creased from 3 to 11, the mean accuracy across all subjects increased
rapidly to 67.38 ± 10.53% for the MSDSC-1 and 96.79 ± 2.45% for the
MSDSC-2. Further increase in the synergy number beyond 11 did not
obviously improve the mean accuracies, which remained stable around
68% and 98% for the respective methods. The ANOVAs confirmed
that there was no significant difference in the accuracy for the synergy
number of 11 versus any larger numbers (p > 0.3). Thus, the synergy
number was optimally set to 11 in the following analysis.
B. Characterization of Muscle Synergies
Given the spatial EMG activity recorded by two-dimensional elec-
trode arrays, each derived muscle synergy could be characterized by a
contour plot, where only one feature was used for each EMG channel,
and its value was represented by different colors. Fig. 5 shows exam-
ples of the EMG MAV feature contour plots for both the positive and
negative patterns of DOF 1 from a representative subject. The left panel
of Fig. 5 shows the contour plots of all derived muscle synergies and
their direct summations for both positive and negative patterns for a
synergy number of 6. Surprisingly, we also found that such a synergy
summation kept almost a constant pattern when varying values of the
synergy number, as shown in the right panel of Fig. 5.
The individual synergies were likely to appear in distinct contour
plots at different synergy numbers, but their summations offered a
straightforward way of characterizing each DOF pattern. Therefore,
Fig. 6 shows contour plots of synergy summations for both patterns
of all five DOFs at a synergy number of 11. Based on the muscle
synergy summation, each DOF showed distinct positive and negative
patterns. The contour plots in this case were based on only MAV, an
amplitude-associated EMG feature, but more features were extracted in
the following pattern recognition, including MAV, WL, ZC, and SSC.
C. Classification Results for Simultaneous Control
With the synergy number set to 11, myoelectric pattern recogni-
tion analyses were performed using the two proposed MSDSC meth-
ods. Fig. 7 shows the classification accuracies averaged across all
18 neurologically intact subjects. MSDSC-2 outperformed MSDSC-1
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON HUMAN-MACHINE SYSTEMS 5

Fig. 5. Examples of the muscle synergy contour plots measured by a MAV feature (units of µV) of surface EMG for both the positive and negative patterns of
DOF 1 from one representative subject (Subject 1). The left panel shows contour plots of all individual muscle synergies and their direct summations when the
synergy number was set to 6. The right panel shows all these synergy summations for both patterns when the synergy number was set to 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, and 11,
respectively. The summation is equal to the sole synergy at the synergy number of 1.

Fig. 6. Muscle synergy summations for both positive and negative patterns of
all five DOFs when the synergy number was set to 11.

Fig. 7. Average classification accuracies across all 18 neurologically intact

and LDCSC in both DOF pattern identification and task discrimina-
tion. The accuracy for final task discrimination was also lower than
that for DOF pattern identification due to the stronger criterion where
the correctness of the final task discrimination relied on simultaneous
correctness of five decisions of all DOFs.
Fig. 8 shows the overall classification accuracies for 18 neurologi-
cally intact subjects and two stroke subjects, where only the mean accu-
racies averaged over all neurological intact subjects were reported with
standard deviations. With the neurologically intact data, MSDSC-2 had
a high mean accuracy of 96.79 ± 2.46%, whereas that for MSDSC-1
was only 67.38 ± 10.53%. The LDCSC and LDC achieved mean accu-
racies of 87.36% ± 4.11% and 91.66% ± 5.66%, respectively. Pairwise
comparisons in ANOVA further indicated that there was a significant
difference (p < 0.001) in overall accuracy between any two pairs of
classification methods. This shows that the proposed MSDSC-2 method
outperformed the other three approaches across neurologically intact
subjects. With the stroke data, the overall accuracies were 44.58%,
81.81%, 72.96%, and 82.16% for subject S1, while they were 26.26%,
subjects for identifying two patterns of five individual DOFs and for discrimi-
nating all 18 finger movement tasks using MSDSC-1, MSDSC-2, and LDCSC
methods, respectively. The error bars indicate standard deviations.
81.09%, 59.04%, and 86.87% for subject S2 for MSDSC-1, MSDSC-2,
LDCSC, and LDC, respectively.
IV. DISCUSSION
Simultaneous myoelectric control of multiple DOFs could provide
a practical way of developing advanced muscle-computer interfaces.
This study proposes a novel framework for simultaneous control of
5 DOFs using muscle-synergy-based EMG pattern recognition at the
individual DOF level. The promising classification results validated
the effectiveness of the proposed method. Moreover, when testing on a
common PC with a 3.4-GHz Core i3 CPU and 4GB RAM, we calculated
a time delay of about 7 ms for processing a 256-ms analysis window
using either of the MSDSC methods. This demonstrates the computa-
tional efficiency of the proposed method for realizing real-time control
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6 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON HUMAN-MACHINE SYSTEMS
Fig. 8. Classification accuracies for all neurologically intact subjects and
stroke subjects S1, S2 using tested classification methods.
systems. The proposed method offers a feasible solution for simultane-
ous control of multiple DOFs, which would not only benefit prosthetic
users but also has potential applications in stroke rehabilitation.
Increasing the synergy number from 3 to 11 led to dramatic improve-
ment in average accuracy from 70% to approximately 97%, but further
increases did not change the performance much. This indicates that a
limited number of muscle synergies may be sufficient to characterize
complex functional tasks. This finding is consistent with a previous
study reporting that eight synergies could account for at least 90% of
the variance of all myoelectric patterns of hand postures [19]. Based
on the tradeoff between classification performance and computational
burden, the synergy number was set to 11 in this study.
The use of a high-density surface EMG electrode array has proven
to offer a great opportunity to record valuable spatial information about
muscular activities [13]. Given such spatial information, the processed
muscle synergies can be visualized in the form of contour plots, as
shown in Figs. 5 and 6. Although the resultant muscle synergies were
likely to vary with different synergy numbers, quite surprisingly, the
contour plots of the summation of all the decomposed muscle synergies
remained almost constant (see Fig. 5). Therefore, it was straightforward
to compare the muscle synergies derived from different DOF patterns
by the contour plots of their summations. Specific to each DOF state,
the muscle synergy summation over the forearm muscles had a distinct
pattern (see Fig. 6), which demonstrated the fundamental feasibility of
performing synergy-based myoelectric classification at the individual
DOF level.
Compared with purely statistical learning approaches (e.g., conven-
tional LDC), those based on motor control mechanisms (e.g., muscle
synergy hypothesis) have been considered to be more suitable for real-
izing natural and intuitive myoelectric control [19], [20], [23]. Inspired
by this consideration, the current study was designed to evolve the
MSD method [23] toward simultaneous control through MSDSC-1 and
MSDSC-2. The primary difference between both methods is the way
of determining the state of an individual DOF. The MSDSC-1 method
relies on a predefined threshold, whereas the MSDSC-2 method
compares between both positive and negative states. The MSDSC-2
method outperformed the MSDSC-1 method in overall accuracy with
statistical significance. This shows that the MSDSC-2 method is more
robust to the variation of data samples. For example, the deviation of
synergy fitting may increase due to external interference. As a result,
the performance of the MSDSC-1 method was compromised because
its fixed threshold might be sensitive to noise. With data from neuro-
logically intact subjects, the MSDSC-2 method outperformed the other
methods with a statistically significant accuracy improvement of over
5% (p < 0.001). Moreover, the superior performance of MSDSC-2 over
LDCSC indicated the advantage of using the muscle-synergy-based
approach as a DOF classifier for simultaneous control.
Both stroke subjects had obviously lower classification accuracies
than the accuracies averaged across neurologically intact subjects, re-
gardless of the classification method. Such performance degradation
has been reported consistently by many previous studies [13]–[15] and
is probably due to the affected delivery of neural control information
in paretic muscles following stroke. However, among the three ap-
proaches supporting simultaneous control, the MSDSC-2 achieved the
highest accuracy for both stroke subjects. High accuracy over 80%
could potentially guarantee the implementation of simultaneous my-
oelectric control devices for advanced robotic training, which would
enable stroke subjects to perform dexterous movements voluntarily
toward enhanced functional restoration. Although the LDC method
yielded comparable or even slightly higher accuracies, it worked in
the manner of a conventional sequential control without simultaneous
control capability.
The main limitation of the current study is that only the OFFLINE
classification was presented without an evaluation of real-time con-
trollability. Based on the very preliminary test on the processing
delay in the current study, it should be acknowledged that the pro-
posed framework is computationally efficient and fully compatible
with real-time applications. Our future work focuses on actual imple-
mentation of the proposed simultaneous myoelectric control devices,
especially for dexterous hand robotic training towards enhanced stroke
rehabilitation.
V. CONCLUSION
We presented a novel framework for simultaneous myoelectric con-
trol of multiple DOFs by implementing myoelectric pattern recogni-
tion based on the muscle synergies at each DOF level. The feasibility
of the framework was demonstrated by discriminating 18 hand ges-
tures involving dexterous finger movements, where an individual fin-
ger corresponds to one DOF. The proposed framework (particularly
the MSDSC-2 method) outperformed the other methods in terms of
the average accuracy from 18 neurologically intact test subjects (p <
0.001). The method was also demonstrated with data from hemiparetic
stroke subjects. The framework is a feasible solution for simultaneous
myoelectric control of multiple DOFs with potential applications in
driving dexterous hand/finger prosthetic devices or robotic training.
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