HDE-Array: Development and Validation of a New Dry Electrode Array Design to Acquire HD-sEMG for Hand Position Estimation

TL;DR

This study introduces HDE-Array, a new dry electrode array for high-density surface electromyography, demonstrating comparable or better hand position estimation accuracy with RPC-Net compared to traditional gel electrodes, with potential benefits for rehabilitation devices.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel dry electrode array design, HDE-Array, validated for effective hand position estimation using HD-sEMG signals with RPC-Net, offering a cost-effective and user-friendly alternative to gel electrodes.

Findings

HDE-Array achieves comparable or superior accuracy to gel electrodes in hand position estimation.

Dry electrodes show effective performance with simplified setup.

Variance analysis confirms minimal information loss with two-row electrode design.

Abstract

This paper aims to introduce HDE-Array (High-Density Electrode Array), a novel dry electrode array for acquiring High-Density surface electromyography (HD-sEMG) for hand position estimation through RPC-Net (Recursive Prosthetic Control Network), a neural network defined in a previous study. We aim to demonstrate the hypothesis that the position estimates returned by RPC-Net using HD-sEMG signals acquired with HDE-Array are as accurate as those obtained from signals acquired with gel electrodes. We compared the results, in terms of precision of hand position estimation by RPC-Net, using signals acquired by traditional gel electrodes and by HDE-Array. As additional validation, we performed a variance analysis to confirm that the presence of only two rows of electrodes does not result in an excessive loss of information, and we characterized the electrode-skin impedance to assess the effects of the voltage divider effect and power line interference. Performance tests indicated that RPC-Net, used with HDE-Array, achieved comparable or superior results to those observed when used with the gel electrode setup. The dry electrodes demonstrated effective performance even with a simplified setup, highlighting potential cost and usability benefits. These results suggest improvements in the accessibility and user-friendliness of upper-limb rehabilitation devices and underscore the potential of HDE-Array and RPC-Net to revolutionize control for medical and non-medical applications.