Machine Learning-based sEMG Signal Classification for Hand Gesture Recognition

EMG-based hand gesture recognition uses electromyographic~(EMG) signals to interpret and classify hand movements by analyzing electrical activity generated by muscle contractions. It has wide applications in prosthesis control, rehabilitation training, and human-computer interaction. Using electrodes placed on the skin, the EMG sensor captures muscle signals, which are processed and filtered to reduce noise. Numerous feature extraction and machine learning algorithms have been proposed to extract and classify muscle signals to distinguish between various hand gestures. This paper aims to benchmark the performance of EMG-based hand gesture recognition using novel feature extraction methods, namely, fused time-domain descriptors, temporal-spatial descriptors, and wavelet transform-based features, combined with the state-of-the-art machine and deep learning models. Experimental investigations on the Grabmyo dataset demonstrate that the 1D Dilated CNN performed the best with an accuracy of $97\%$ using fused time-domain descriptors such as power spectral moments, sparsity, irregularity factor and waveform length ratio. Similarly, on the FORS-EMG dataset, random forest performed the best with an accuracy of $94.95\%$ using temporal-spatial descriptors (which include time domain features along with additional features such as coefficient of variation (COV), and Teager-Kaiser energy operator (TKEO)).

PatchBMI-Net: Lightweight Facial Patch-based Ensemble for BMI Prediction

Due to an alarming trend related to obesity affecting 93.3 million adults in the United States alone, body mass index (BMI) and body weight have drawn significant interest in various health monitoring applications. Consequently, several studies have proposed self-diagnostic facial image-based BMI prediction methods for healthy weight monitoring. These methods have mostly used convolutional neural network (CNN) based regression baselines, such as VGG19, ResNet50, and Efficient-NetB0, for BMI prediction from facial images. However, the high computational requirement of these heavy-weight CNN models limits their deployment to resource-constrained mobile devices, thus deterring weight monitoring using smartphones. This paper aims to develop a lightweight facial patch-based ensemble (PatchBMI-Net) for BMI prediction to facilitate the deployment and weight monitoring using smartphones. Extensive experiments on BMI-annotated facial image datasets suggest that our proposed PatchBMI-Net model can obtain Mean Absolute Error (MAE) in the range [3.58, 6.51] with a size of about 3.3 million parameters. On cross-comparison with heavyweight models, such as ResNet-50 and Xception, trained for BMI prediction from facial images, our proposed PatchBMI-Net obtains equivalent MAE along with the model size reduction of about 5.4x and the average inference time reduction of about 3x when deployed on Apple-14 smartphone. Thus, demonstrating performance efficiency as well as low latency for on-device deployment and weight monitoring using smartphone applications.