A Flexible and Modular Body-Machine Interface for Individuals Living with Severe Disabilities

TL;DR

This paper introduces a modular, wireless body-machine interface that accurately translates residual body motions into control commands for individuals with severe disabilities, enabling improved assistive technology interaction.

Contribution

It presents a novel, wearable multi-sensor network combined with EMG gesture recognition and lightweight classification for real-time control, adaptable to various residual capabilities.

Findings

Achieved 99.96% accuracy in able-bodied participants.

Achieved 91.66% accuracy in participants with disabilities.

Demonstrated real-time control in a daily activity simulation.

Abstract

This paper presents a control interface to translate the residual body motions of individuals living with severe disabilities, into control commands for body-machine interaction. A custom, wireless, wearable multi-sensor network is used to collect motion data from multiple points on the body in real-time. The solution proposed successfully leverage electromyography gesture recognition techniques for the recognition of inertial measurement units-based commands (IMU), without the need for cumbersome and noisy surface electrodes. Motion pattern recognition is performed using a computationally inexpensive classifier (Linear Discriminant Analysis) so that the solution can be deployed onto lightweight embedded platforms. Five participants (three able-bodied and two living with upper-body disabilities) presenting different motion limitations (e.g. spasms, reduced motion range) were recruited. They were asked to perform up to 9 different motion classes, including head, shoulder, finger, and foot motions, with respect to their residual functional capacities. The measured prediction performances show an average accuracy of 99.96% for able-bodied individuals and 91.66% for participants with upper-body disabilities. The recorded dataset has also been made available online to the research community. Proof of concept for the real-time use of the system is given through an assembly task replicating activities of daily living using the JACO arm from Kinova Robotics.