Feasibility of building robust surface electromyography-based hand gesture interfaces

This study explored the feasibility of building robust surface electromyography (EMG)-based gesture interfaces starting from the definition of input command gestures. As a first step, an offline experimental scheme was carried out for extracting user-independent input command sets with high class separability, reliability and low individual variations from 23 classes of hand gestures. Then three types (same-user, multi-user and cross-user test) of online experiments were conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of building robust surface EMG-based interfaces with the hand gesture sets recommended by the offline experiments. The research results reported in this paper are useful for the development and popularization of surface EMG-based gesture interaction technology.