Cover
Vol. 21 No. 2 (2025)

Published: December 16, 2025

Pages: 265-283

Original Article

Design of Hand Gesture Classification System Based on High Density-Surface Electromyography Accompanied Force Myography

Abstract

A robust system that classifies various hand gestures would greatly help those using prosthetic limbs. Recently, emphasis has been placed on extracted features from the High Density - surface Electromyography (HD-sEMG) signals and the size of segmentation windows which augment the recognition accuracy. This paper proposes a hand gestures identification system, in which HD-sEMG signals are employed, and is supported by Force Myography (FMG) signals for this mission. Several feature types have been extracted from FMG and HD-sEMG signals such as MEAN, RMS, MAD, STD, and Variance, these features have been validated under some classifiers such as decision tree (DT), linear discriminant analysis (LDA), support vector machine SVM, and k-nearest neighbor (KNN), in which results showing that MEAN and RMS features are superior to others, while the best classifier is SVM. Several experiments have been achieved by the MATLAB platform to validate the proposed system, in which, a database of HD-sEMG signals comprising 65 isometric hand gestures is employed, where two (8×8) electrodes and 9 force sensors are used to collect the FMG data. This data was derived from 20 intact participants, the first preprocessing step was applied during the recording stage. Ten gestures are chosen to be classified from the 65 hand gestures. Results show the success of the proposed system while the classification accuracy arrived at 99.1%.

References

  1. B. Yuan, D. Hu, S. Gu, S. Xiao, and F. Song, “The global burden of traumatic amputation in 204 countries and territories,” Frontiers in public health, vol. 11, p. 1258853, 2023.
  2. R. Z. Khan and N. A. Ibraheem, “Hand gesture recognition: a literature review,” International journal of artificial Intelligence & Applications, vol. 3, no. 4, p. 161, 2012.
  3. P. Premaratne and P. Premaratne, “Historical development of hand gesture recognition,” human computer interaction using hand gestures, pp. 5–29, 2014.
  4. J. D. Nguyen and H. Duong, “Anatomy, shoulder and upper limb, hand long flexor tendons and sheaths,” National library of medicine, National center for biotechnology information, StatPearls, 2023.
  5. Y. Du, W. Jin, W. Wei, Y. Hu, and W. Geng, “Surface emg-based inter-session gesture recognition enhanced by deep domain adaptation,” Sensors, vol. 17, no. 3, p. 458, 2017.
  6. S.-W. Byun and S.-P. Lee, “Implementation of hand gesture recognition device applicable to smart watch based on flexible epidermal tactile sensor array,” Micromachines, vol. 10, no. 10, p. 692, 2019.
  7. K. A. Abbas and M. T. Rashid, “Descriptive statistical features-based improvement of hand gesture identification,” Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, vol. 92, p. 106103, 2024.
  8. N. Ha, G. P. Withanachchi, and Y. Yihun, “Force myography signal-based hand gesture classification for the implementation of real-time control system to a prosthetic hand,” in Frontiers in Biomedical Devices, vol. 40789, p. V001T10A013, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 2018.
  9. R. Ma, Z. Zhang, and E. Chen, “Human motion gesture recognition based on computer vision,” Complexity, vol. 2021, no. 1, p. 6679746, 2021.
  10. H. Duan, C. Dai, and W. Chen, “The evaluation of classifier performance during fitting wrist and finger movement task based on forearm hd-semg,” Mathematical Problems in Engineering, vol. 2022, no. 1, p. 9594521, 2022.
  11. H. G¨unes¸ and A. E. Akkaya, “Using wavelet analysis and deep learning for emg-based hand movement signal classification,” Sakarya University Journal of Science, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 214–225, 2023.
  12. H. A. Jaber, M. T. Rashid, H. Mahmood, and L. Fortuna, “Incremental adaptive gesture classifier for upper limb prostheses,” IEEE Sensors Journal, vol. 22, no. 14, pp. 14273–14283, 2022.
  13. M. Montazerin, E. Rahimian, F. Naderkhani, S. F. Atashzar, S. Yanushkevich, and A. Mohammadi, “Transformer-based hand gesture recognition from instantaneous to fused neural decomposition of highdensity emg signals,” Scientific reports, vol. 13, no. 1, p. 11000, 2023.
  14. H. A. Jaber, M. T. Rashid, and L. Fortuna, “Adaptive myoelectric pattern recognition based on hybrid spatial features of hd-semg signals,” Iranian Journal of Science and Technology, Transactions of Electrical Engineering, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 183–194, 2021.
  15. M. Jabbari, R. Khushaba, and K. Nazarpour, “Spatiotemporal warping for myoelectric control: an offline, feasibility study,” Journal of Neural Engineering, vol. 18, no. 6, p. 066028, 2021.
  16. A. S. Khattak, A. b. M. Zain, R. B. Hassan, F. Nazar, M. Haris, and B. A. Ahmed, “Hand gesture recognition with deep residual network using semg signal,” Biomedical Engineering/Biomedizinische Technik, vol. 69, no. 3, pp. 275–291, 2024.
  17. S. M. Massa, D. Riboni, and K. Nazarpour, “Graph neural networks for hd emg-based movement intention recognition: An initial investigation,” in 2022 IEEE International Conference on Recent Advances in Systems Science and Engineering (RASSE), pp. 1–4, IEEE, 2022.
  18. N. Maleˇsevi´c, A. Olsson, P. Sager, E. Andersson, C. Cipriani, M. Controzzi, A. Bj¨orkman, and C. Antfolk, “A database of high-density surface electromyogram signals comprising 65 isometric hand gestures,” Scientific Data, vol. 8, no. 1, p. 63, 2021.
  19. N. Maleˇsevi´c, G. Andersson, A. Bj¨orkman, M. Controzzi, C. Cipriani, and C. Antfolk, “Instrumented platform for assessment of isometric hand muscles contractions,” Measurement Science and Technology, vol. 30, no. 6, p. 065701, 2019.
  20. O. W. Samuel, M. G. Asogbon, Y. Geng, A. H. Al-Timemy, S. Pirbhulal, N. Ji, S. Chen, P. Fang, and G. Li, “Intelligent emg pattern recognition control method for upper-limb multifunctional prostheses: advances, current challenges, and future prospects,” Ieee Access, vol. 7, pp. 10150–10165, 2019.
  21. F. D. Farf´an, J. C. Politti, and C. J. Felice, “Evaluation of emg processing techniques using information theory,” Biomedical engineering online, vol. 9, pp. 1–18, 2010.
  22. R. N. Khushaba and K. Nazarpour, “Decoding hd-emg signals for myoelectric control-how small can the analysis window size be?,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 8569–8574, 2021.
  23. I. Bulugu, Z. Ye, and J. Banzi, “Higher-order local autocorrelation feature extraction methodology for hand gestures recognition,” in 2017 2nd International Conference on Multimedia and Image Processing (ICMIP), pp. 83–87, IEEE, 2017.
  24. H. A. Jaber, M. T. Rashid, and L. Fortuna, “Using the robust high density-surface electromyography features for real-time hand gestures classification,” in IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering, vol. 745, p. 012020, IOP Publishing, 2020.
  25. H. A. Jaber, M. T. Rashid, and L. Fortuna, “Interactive real-time control system for the artificial hand.,” Iraqi Journal for Electrical & Electronic Engineering, vol. 16, no. 1, 2020.
  26. B. E. Boser, I. M. Guyon, and V. N. Vapnik, “A training algorithm for optimal margin classifiers,” in Proceedings of the fifth annual workshop on Computational learning theory, pp. 144–152, 1992.
  27. S. M. Massa, D. Riboni, and K. Nazarpour, “Explainable ai-powered graph neural networks for hd emg-based gesture intention recognition,” IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, 2023.
  28. J. C. Obi, “A comparative study of several classification metrics and their performances on data,” World Journal of Advanced Engineering Technology and Sciences, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 308–314, 2023.
  29. G. A. Azar, Q. Hu, M. Emami, A. Fletcher, S. Rangan, and S. F. Atashzar, “A deep learning sequential decoder for transient high-density electromyography in hand gesture recognition using subject-embedded transfer learning,” IEEE Sensors Journal, 2024.
  30. M. Fora, B. B. Atitallah, K. Lweesy, and O. Kanoun, “Hand gesture recognition based on force myography measurements using knn classifier,” in 2021 18th International Multi-Conference on Systems, Signals & Devices (SSD), pp. 960–964, IEEE, 2021.