Methodology Proposal of EMG Hand Movement Classification Based on Cross Recurrence Plots

Dealing with electromyography (EMG) signals is often not simple. The nature of these signals is nonstationary, noisy, and high dimensional. These EMG characteristics make their predictability even more challenging. Cross recurrence plots (CRPs) have demonstrated in many works their capability of detecting very subtle patterns in signals often buried in a noisy environment. In this contribution, fifty subjects performed ten different hand movements with each hand with the aid of electrodes placed in each arm. Furthermore, the nonlinear features of each subject’s signals using cross recurrence quantification analysis (CRQA) have been performed. Also, a novel methodology is proposed using CRQA as the mainstream technique to detect and classify each of the movements presented in this study. Additional tools were presented to determine to which extent this proposed methodology is able to avoid false classifications, thus demonstrating that this methodology is feasible to classify surface EMG (SEMG) signals with good accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. Lastly, the results were compared with traditional machine learning methods, and the advantages of using the proposed methodology above such methods are highlighted.