Real-Time Motor Unit Tracking from sEMG Signals with Adaptive ICA on a Parallel Ultra-Low Power Processor.

Spike extraction by blind source separation (BSS) algorithms can successfully extract physiologically meaningful information from the sEMG signal, as they are able to identify motor unit (MU) discharges involved in muscle contractions. However, BSS approaches are currently restricted to isometric contractions, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. We present a strategy to track MUs across different dynamic hand gestures using adaptive independent component analysis (ICA): first, a pool of MUs is identified during isometric contractions, and the decomposition parameters are stored; during dynamic gestures, the decomposition parameters are updated online in an unsupervised fashion, yielding the refined MUs; then, a Pan-Tompkins-inspired algorithm detects the spikes in each MUs; finally, the identified spikes are fed to a classifier to recognize the gesture. We validate our approach on a 4-subject, 7-gesture + rest dataset collected with our custom 16-channel dry sEMG armband, achieving an average balanced accuracy of 85.58±14.91% and macro-F1 score of 85.86±14.48%. We deploy our solution onto GAP9, a parallel ultra-low-power microcontroller specialized for computation-intensive linear algebra applications at the edge, obtaining an energy consumption of 4.72 mJ @ 240 MHz and a latency of 121.3 ms for each 200 ms-long window of sEMG signal.

sEMG-driven Hand Dynamics Estimation with Incremental Online Learning on a Parallel Ultra-Low-Power Microcontroller.

Surface electromyography (sEMG) is a State-of-the-Art (SoA) sensing modality for non-invasive human-machine interfaces for consumer, industrial, and rehabilitation use cases. The main limitation of the current sEMG-driven control policies is the sEMG's inherent variability, especially cross-session due to sensor repositioning; this limits the generalization of the Machine/Deep Learning (ML/DL) in charge of the signal-to-command mapping. The other hot front on the ML/DL side of sEMG-driven control is the shift from the classification of fixed hand positions to the regression of hand kinematics and dynamics, promising a more versatile and fluid control. We present an incremental online-training strategy for sEMG-based estimation of simultaneous multi-finger forces, using a small Temporal Convolutional Network suitable for embedded learning-on-device. We validate our method on the HYSER dataset, cross-day. Our incremental online training reaches a cross-day Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of (9.58 ± 3.89)% of the Maximum Voluntary Contraction on HYSER's RANDOM dataset of improvised, non-predefined force sequences, which is the most challenging and closest to real scenarios. This MAE is on par with an accuracy-oriented, non-embeddable offline training exploiting more epochs. Further, we demonstrate that our online training approach can be deployed on the GAP9 ultra-low power microcontroller, obtaining a latency of 1.49 ms and an energy draw of just 40.4 uJ per forward-backward-update step. These results show that our solution fits the requirements for accurate and real-time incremental training-on-device.

Node Centrality Measures Identify Relevant Structural MRI Features of Subjects with Autism.

Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are a heterogeneous group of neurodevelopmental conditions characterized by impairments in social interaction and communication and restricted patterns of behavior, interests, and activities. Although the etiopathogenesis of idiopathic ASD has not been fully elucidated, compelling evidence suggests an interaction between genetic liability and environmental factors in producing early alterations of structural and functional brain development that are detectable by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at the group level. This work shows the results of a network-based approach to characterize not only variations in the values of the extracted features but also in their mutual relationships that might reflect underlying brain structural differences between autistic subjects and healthy controls. We applied a network-based analysis on sMRI data from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange I (ABIDE-I) database, containing 419 features extracted with FreeSurfer software. Two networks were generated: one from subjects with autistic disorder (AUT) (DSM-IV-TR), and one from typically developing controls (TD), adopting a subsampling strategy to overcome class imbalance (235 AUT, 418 TD). We compared the distribution of several node centrality measures and observed significant inter-class differences in averaged centralities. Moreover, a single-node analysis allowed us to identify the most relevant features that distinguished the groups.

Robust Real-Time Embedded EMG Recognition Framework Using Temporal Convolutional Networks on a Multicore IoT Processor.

Hand movement classification via surface electromyographic (sEMG) signal is a well-established approach for advanced Human-Computer Interaction. However, sEMG movement recognition has to deal with the long-term reliability of sEMG-based control, limited by the variability affecting the sEMG signal. Embedded solutions are affected by a recognition accuracy drop over time that makes them unsuitable for reliable gesture controller design. In this paper, we present a complete wearable-class embedded system for robust sEMG-based gesture recognition, based on Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs). Firstly, we developed a novel TCN topology (TEMPONet), and we tested our solution on a benchmark dataset (Ninapro), achieving 49.6% average accuracy, 7.8%, better than current State-Of-the-Art (SoA). Moreover, we designed an energy-efficient embedded platform based on GAP8, a novel 8-core IoT processor. Using our embedded platform, we collected a second 20-sessions dataset to validate the system on a setup which is representative of the final deployment. We obtain 93.7% average accuracy with the TCN, comparable with a SoA SVM approach (91.1%). Finally, we profiled the performance of the network implemented on GAP8 by using an 8-bit quantization strategy to fit the memory constraint of the processor. We reach a 4× lower memory footprint (460 kB) with a performance degradation of only 3% accuracy. We detailed the execution on the GAP8 platform, showing that the quantized network executes a single classification in 12.84 ms with a power envelope of 0.9 mJ, making it suitable for a long-lifetime wearable deployment.