We developed an upper-limb power-assist exoskeleton actuated by pneumatic muscles. The exoskeleton included two metal links: a nylon joint, four size-adjustable carbon fiber bracers, a potentiometer and two pneumatic muscles. The proportional myoelectric control method was proposed to control the exoskeleton according to the user’s motion intention in real time. With the feature extraction procedure and the classification (back-propagation neural network), an electromyogram (EMG)-angle model was constructed to be used for pattern recognition. Six healthy subjects performed elbow flexion-extension movements under four experimental conditions: (1) holding a 1-kg load, wearing the exoskeleton, but with no actuation and for different periods (2-s, 4-s and 8-s periods); (2) holding a 1-kg load, without wearing the exoskeleton, for a fixed period; (3) holding a 1-kg load, wearing the exoskeleton, but with no actuation, for a fixed period; (4) holding a 1-kg load, wearing the exoskeleton under proportional myoelectric control, for a fixed period. The EMG signals of the biceps brachii, the brachioradialis, the triceps brachii and the anconeus and the angle of the elbow were collected. The control scheme’s reliability and power-assist effectiveness were evaluated in the experiments. The results indicated that the exoskeleton could be controlled by the user’s motion intention in real time and that it was useful for augmenting arm performance with neurological signal control, which could be applied to assist in elbow rehabilitation after neurological injury.

To recognize the user’s motion intention, brain-machine interfaces (BMI) usually decode movements from cortical activity to control exoskeletons and neuroprostheses for daily activities. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether self-induced variations of the electroencephalogram (EEG) can be useful as control signals for an upper-limb exoskeleton developed by us. A BMI based on event-related desynchronization/synchronization (ERD/ERS) is proposed. In the decoder-training phase, we investigate the offline classification performance of left versus right hand and left hand versus both feet by using motor execution (ME) or motor imagery (MI). The results indicate that the accuracies of ME sessions are higher than those of MI sessions, and left hand versus both feet paradigm achieves a better classification performance, which would be used in the online-control phase. In the online-control phase, the trained decoder is tested in two scenarios (wearing or without wearing the exoskeleton). The MI and ME sessions wearing the exoskeleton achieve mean classification accuracy of 84.29% ± 2.11% and 87.37% ± 3.06%, respectively. The present study demonstrates that the proposed BMI is effective to control the upper-limb exoskeleton, and provides a practical method by non-invasive EEG signal associated with human natural behavior for clinical applications.

Human gait, as a soft biometric, helps to recognize people through their walking. To further improve the recognition performance, we propose a novel video sensor-based gait representation, DeepGait, using deep convolutional features and introduce Joint Bayesian to model view variance. DeepGait is generated by using a pre-trained “very deep” network “D-Net” (VGG-D) without any fine-tuning. For non-view setting, DeepGait outperforms hand-crafted representations (e.g., Gait Energy Image, Frequency-Domain Feature and Gait Flow Image, etc.). Furthermore, for cross-view setting, 256-dimensional DeepGait after PCA significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the OU-ISR large population (OULP) dataset. The OULP dataset, which includes 4007 subjects, makes our result reliable in a statistically reliable way.

Subject-independent emotion recognition based on physiological signals has become a research hotspot. Previous research has proved that electrodermal activity (EDA) signals are an effective data resource for emotion recognition. Benefiting from their great representation ability, an increasing number of deep neural networks have been applied for emotion recognition, and they can be classified as a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), or a combination of these (CNN+RNN). However, there has been no systematic research on the predictive power and configurations of different deep neural networks in this task. In this work, we systematically explore the configurations and performances of three adapted deep neural networks: ResNet, LSTM, and hybrid ResNet-LSTM. Our experiments use the subject-independent method to evaluate the three-class classification on the MAHNOB dataset. The results prove that the CNN model (ResNet) reaches a better accuracy and F1 score than the RNN model (LSTM) and the CNN+RNN model (hybrid ResNet-LSTM). Extensive comparisons also reveal that our three deep neural networks with EDA data outperform previous models with handcraft features on emotion recognition, which proves the great potential of the end-to-end DNN method.

The research goal of this paper is to identify major academic branches and to detect research trends in design research using text mining techniques. In this paper, the information about scientific literature in design research isprocessed. A combination of clustering and bibliometric analysis led to shaping four academic branches and summarizing each academic branch. Then, research trends and the evolution for each academic branch are explored. We perform a two-dimensional text mining approach, including bibliometric and network analysis, in order to detect trends of major academic branches. Specifically, the bibliometric characterization aims to assess design research area outputs, while the network analysis intends to reveal research trends in each academic branch of design research and the evolution of core research themes.