sEMG-based torque estimation for robot-assisted lower limb rehabilitation

sEMG (surface electromyography) signals have been used as human-machine interface to control robots or prostheses in recent years. sEMG-based torque estimation is a widely research methodology to obtain human motion intention. Most researches focus on improving the accuracy of sEMG-torque models, which often makes them complicated and confined in the laboratory research. However, an accurate estimation of muscle torque could be unnecessary to perform the robot-assisted rehabilitation training. This paper proposes a practical method to estimate the net muscle torques of lower limbs using sEMG, which can be used to implement a real-time coordinated active training with iLeg-a horizontal exoskeleton for lower limb rehabilitation developed at our laboratory. Two three-layer back propagation (BP) neural networks are built to estimate the net muscle torques at hip and knee joints respectively. Experimental results show that the well-trained neural networks estimate the user´s motion intention in real-time, and can assist the user to perform an active training with iLeg.