Big data in myoelectric control: large multi-user models enable robust zero-shot EMG-based discrete gesture recognition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Myoelectric control, the use of electromyogram (EMG) signals generated during muscle contractions to control a system or device, is a promising input, enabling always-available control for emerging ubiquitous computing applications. However, its widespread use has historically been limited by the need for user-specific machine learning models because of behavioural and physiological differences between users. Leveraging the publicly available 612-user EMG-EPN612 dataset, this work dispels this notion, showing that true zero-shot cross-user myoelectric control is achievable without user-specific training. By taking a discrete approach to classification (i.e., recognizing the entire dynamic gesture as a single event), a classification accuracy of 93.0% for six gestures was achieved on a set of 306 unseen users, showing that big data approaches can enable robust cross-user myoelectric control. By organizing the results into a series of mini-studies, this work provides an in-depth analysis of discrete cross-user models to answer unknown questions and uncover new research directions. In particular, this work explores the number of participants required to build cross-user models, the impact of transfer learning for fine-tuning these models, and the effects of under-represented end-user demographics in the training data, among other issues. Additionally, in order to further evaluate the performance of the developed cross-user models, a completely new dataset was created (using the same recording device) that includes known covariate factors such as cross-day use and limb-position variability. The results show that the large data models can effectively generalize to new datasets and mitigate the impact of common confounding factors that have historically limited the adoption of EMG-based inputs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".