ChatEMG: Synthetic Data Generation to Control a Robotic Hand Orthosis for Stroke

TL;DR

ChatEMG is a novel generative model that produces synthetic EMG signals conditioned on prompts, enabling improved intent inference for stroke patients' robotic hand orthoses with minimal data collection.

Contribution

It introduces ChatEMG, the first autoregressive generative model for synthetic EMG data that enhances intent classification in orthosis control with limited real data.

Findings

Synthetic EMG data improves classifier accuracy.

Model enables functional orthosis control in a single session.

Synthetic data is classifier-agnostic and effective across classifiers.

Abstract

Intent inferral on a hand orthosis for stroke patients is challenging due to the difficulty of data collection. Additionally, EMG signals exhibit significant variations across different conditions, sessions, and subjects, making it hard for classifiers to generalize. Traditional approaches require a large labeled dataset from the new condition, session, or subject to train intent classifiers; however, this data collection process is burdensome and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose ChatEMG, an autoregressive generative model that can generate synthetic EMG signals conditioned on prompts (i.e., a given sequence of EMG signals). ChatEMG enables us to collect only a small dataset from the new condition, session, or subject and expand it with synthetic samples conditioned on prompts from this new context. ChatEMG leverages a vast repository of previous data via generative training while still remaining context-specific via prompting. Our experiments show that these synthetic samples are classifier-agnostic and can improve intent inferral accuracy for different types of classifiers. We demonstrate that our complete approach can be integrated into a single patient session, including the use of the classifier for functional orthosis-assisted tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time an intent classifier trained partially on synthetic data has been deployed for functional control of an orthosis by a stroke survivor. Videos, source code, and additional information can be found at https://jxu.ai/chatemg.