In recent years, the successful application of Deep Learning methods to classification problems has had a huge impact in many domains. In biomedical engineering, the problem of gesture recognition based on electromyography is often addressed as an image classification problem using Convolutional Neural Networks. In this paper, we approach electromyography-based hand gesture recognition as a sequence classification problem using Temporal Convolutional Networks. The proposed network yields an improvement in gesture recognition of almost 5% to the state of the art reported in the literature, whereas the analysis helps in understanding the limitations of the model and exploring new ways to improve its performance.

The range of applications of electromyography-based gesture recognition has increased over the last years. A common problem regularly encountered in literature is the inadequate data availability. Data augmentation, which aims at generating new synthetic data from the existing ones, is the most common approach to deal with this data shortage in other research domains. In the case of surface electromyography (sEMG) signals, there is limited research in augmentation methods and quite regularly the results differ between available studies. In this work, we provide a detailed evaluation of existing (i.e., additive noise, overlapping windows) and novel (i.e., magnitude warping, wavelet decomposition, synthetic sEMG models) strategies of data augmentation for electromyography signals. A set of metrics (i.e., classification accuracy, silhouette score, and Davies–Bouldin index) and visualizations help with the assessment and provides insights about their performance. Methods like signal magnitude warping and wavelet decomposition yield considerable increase (up to 16%) in classification accuracy across two benchmark datasets. Particularly, a significant improvement of 1% in the classification accuracy of the state-of-the-art model in hand gesture recognition is achieved.

In the context of the ageing global population, researchers and scientists have tried to find solutions to many challenges faced by older people. Falls, the leading cause of injury among elderly, are usually severe enough to require immediate medical attention; thus, their detection is of primary importance. To this effect, many fall detection systems that utilize wearable and ambient sensors have been proposed. In this study, we compare three newly proposed data fusion schemes that have been applied in human activity recognition and fall detection. Furthermore, these algorithms are compared to our recent work regarding fall detection in which only one type of sensor is used. The results show that fusion algorithms differ in their performance, whereas a machine learning strategy should be preferred. In conclusion, the methods presented and the comparison of their performance provide useful insights into the problem of fall detection.

Falls can be severe enough to cause disabilities especially to frail populations. Thus, prompt health care provision is essential to prevent and restore any harm. The purpose of this study is to develop a smartphone-based fall detection system that can distinguish between falls and activities of daily living (ADL). The typical fall detection system consists of a sensing component and a notification module. Android devices, equipped with sensors and communication services, are the best candidates for the development of such systems. This work incorporates a threshold based algorithm, whose accuracy is enhanced by a k Nearest Neighbor (kNN) classifier. In addition, this paper proposes the implementation of a personalization and power regulation system. It achieves high fall detection accuracy, (97.53% sensitivity and 94.89% specificity), which is comparable to related works.

Deep learning has transformed the field of data analysis by dramatically improving the state of the art in various classification and prediction tasks, especially in the area of computer vision. In biomedical engineering, a lot of new work is directed toward surface electromyography (sEMG)-based gesture recognition, often addressed as an image classification problem using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In this paper, we utilize the Hilbert space-filling curve for the generation of image representations of sEMG signals, which allows the application of typical image processing pipelines such as CNNs on sequence data. The proposed method is evaluated on different state-of-the-art network architectures and yields a significant classification improvement over the approach without the Hilbert curve. Additionally, we develop a new network architecture (MSHilbNet) that takes advantage of multiple scales of an initial Hilbert curve representation and achieves equal performance with fewer convolutional layers.