Evaluation of windowing techniques for intramuscular EMG-based diagnostic, rehabilitative and assistive devices

Abstract Objective. Intramuscular electromyography (iEMG) signals, invasively recorded, directly from the muscles are used to diagnose various neuromuscular disorders/diseases and to control rehabilitative and assistive robotic devices. iEMG signals are potentially being used in neurology, kinesiology, rehabilitation and ergonomics, to detect/diagnose various diseases/disorders. Electromyography-based classification and analysis systems are being designed and tested for the classification of various neuromuscular disorders and to control rehabilitative and assistive robotic devices. Many studies have explored parameters such as the pre-processing, feature extraction and selection of classifiers that can affect the performance and efficacy of iEMG-based classification systems. The pre-processing stage includes the removal of any unwanted noise from the original signal and windowing of the signal. Approach. This study investigated and presented the optimum windowing configurations for robust control and better performance results of an iEMG-based analysis system based on the stationarity rate (SR) and classification accuracy. Both disjoint and overlap, windowing techniques with varying window and overlap sizes have been investigated using a machine learning-based classification algorithm called linear discriminant analysis. Main results. The optimum window size ranges are from 200–300 ms for the disjoint and 225–300 ms for the overlap windowing technique, respectively. The inferred results show that for the overlap windowing technique the optimum range of overlap size is from 10%–30% of the length of window size. The mean classification accuracy (MCA) and mean stationarity rate (MSR) were found to be lower in the disjoint windowing technique compared to overlap windowing at all investigated overlap sizes. Statistical analysis (two-way analysis of variance test) showed that the MSR and MCA of the overlap windowing technique was significantly different at overlap sizes of 10%–30% ( p -values < 0.05). Significance. The presented results can be used to achieve the best possible classification results and SR for any iEMG-based real-time diagnosis, detection and control system, which can enhance the performance of the system significantly.