Objective. Brain-computer interface (BCI) technology based on motor imagery (MI) control has become a research hotspot but continues to encounter numerous challenges. BCI can assist in the recovery of stroke patients and serve as a key technology in robot control. Current research on MI almost exclusively focuses on the hands, feet, and tongue. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to establish a four-class MI BCI system, in which the four types are the four articulations within the right upper limbs, involving the shoulder, elbow, wrist, and hand. Approach. Ten subjects were chosen to perform nine upper-limb analytic movements, after which the differences were compared in P300, movement-related potentials(MRPS), and event-related desynchronization/event-related synchronization under voluntary MI (V-MI) and involuntary MI (INV-MI). Next, the cross-frequency coupling (CFC) coefficient based on mutual information was extracted from the electrodes and frequency bands with interest. Combined with the image Fourier transform and twin bounded support vector machine classifier, four kinds of electroencephalography data were classified, and the classifier’s parameters were optimized using a genetic algorithm. Main results. The results were shown to be encouraging, with an average accuracy of 93.2% and 92.2% for V-MI and INV-MI, respectively, and over 95% for any three classes and any two classes. In most cases, the accuracy of feature extraction using the proximal articulations as the basis was found to be relatively high and had better performance. Significance. This paper discussed four types of MI according to three aspects under two modes and classed them by combining graph Fourier transform and CFC. Accordingly, the theoretical discussion and classification methods may provide a fundamental theoretical basis for BCI interface applications.

Objective. Recent technological advances show the feasibility of fusing surface electromyography (sEMG) signals and movement data to predict lower limb ambulation intentions. However, since the invasive fusion of different signals is a major impediment to improving predictive performance, searching for a non-invasive (NI) fusion mechanism for lower limb ambulation pattern recognition based on different modal features is crucial. Approach . We propose an end-to-end sequence prediction model with NI dual attention temporal convolutional networks (NIDA-TCNs) as a core to elegantly address the essential deficiencies of traditional decision models with heterogeneous signal fusion. Notably, the NIDA-TCN is a weighted fusion of sEMG and inertial measurement units with time-dependent effective hidden information in the temporal and channel dimensions using TCN and self-attentive mechanisms. The new model can better discriminate between walking, jumping, downstairs, and upstairs four lower limb activities of daily living. Main results . The results of this study show that the NIDA-TCN models produce predictions that significantly outperform both frame-wise and TCN models in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, precision, F1 score, and stability. Particularly, the NIDA-TCN with sequence decision fusion (NIDA-TCN-SDF) models, have maximum accuracy and stability increments of 3.37% and 4.95% relative to the frame-wise model, respectively, without manual feature-encoding and complex model parameters. Significance . It is concluded that the results demonstrate the validity and feasibility of the NIDA-TCN-SDF models to ensure the prediction of daily lower limb ambulation activities, paving the way to the development of fused heterogeneous signal decoding with better prediction performance.

The emergence of modern prosthetics controlled by bio-signals has been facilitated by AI and microchip technology innovations. AI algorithms are trained using sEMG produced by muscles during contractions. The data acquisition procedure may result in discomfort and fatigue, particularly for amputees. Furthermore, prosthetic companies restrict sEMG signal exchange, limiting data-driven research and reproducibility. GANs present a viable solution to the aforementioned concerns. GANs can generate high-quality sEMG, which can be utilised for data augmentation, decrease the training time required by prosthetic users, enhance classification accuracy and ensure research reproducibility. This research proposes the utilisation of a one-dimensional deep convolutional GAN (1DDCGAN) to generate the sEMG of hand gestures. This approach involves the incorporation of dynamic time wrapping, fast Fourier transform and wavelets as discriminator inputs. Two datasets were utilised to validate the methodology, where five windows and increments were utilised to extract features to evaluate the synthesised sEMG quality. In addition to the traditional classification and augmentation metrics, two novel metrics—the Mantel test and the classifier two-sample test—were used for evaluation. The 1DDCGAN preserved the inter-feature correlations and generated high-quality signals, which resembled the original data. Additionally, the classification accuracy improved by an average of 1.21–5%.