Ankle foot motion recognition based on wireless wearable sEMG and acceleration sensors for smart AFO

Ankle joint is one of the important anatomical structures of the human body, smart ankle-foot ortho-sis(AFO) can assist human walking and improve the ankle motion for patients. This study focused on ankle foot movements recognition based on data fusion via sEMG and acceleration sensors. A wireless signal acquisition system (WAS) was designed specifically, forming a platform to demonstrate and record individual sEMG and acceleration data simultaneously. In the experimental tests, three channel sEMG signals from Tibialis Anterior (TA), Gastrocnemius (GM) and Soleus (SO), as well as three-axis acceler-ation data of the ankle joints, were collected when subjects performed four kinds of typical motions including dorsiflexion, plantar flexion, eversion and inversion. A total of 21,600 frames of sEMG /acceler-ation action data were constructed and then different kinds of classification algorithms were studied to classify the motions by the principal component analysis (PCA) based data fusion signal features. Results showed that the classification accuracy of bi-directional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) algorithm performed the best compared with traditional networks such as support vector machine(SVM), artifi-cial neural network (ANN) and reached 99.8 %. These results demonstrated the potential application for accurate ankle foot intent identification by sEMG and acceleration sensors, which provided the basis for further implementation of subsequent smart AFO manipulation. (c) 2021 Published by Elsevier B.V.

Automated summary

This study focused on ankle foot movements recognition based on data fusion via sEMG and acceleration sensors. The results showed that the BiLSTM algorithm achieved the highest classification accuracy of 99.8% compared to traditional networks, demonstrating the potential for accurate ankle foot intent identification by sEMG and acceleration sensors, which can be applied in smart AFO manipulation.