In recent years, surface electromyography (sEMG) signals have been increasingly used in pattern recognition and rehabilitation. In this paper, a real-time hand gesture recognition model using sEMG is proposed. We use an armband to acquire sEMG signals and apply a sliding window approach to segment the data in extracting features. A feedforward artificial neural network (ANN) is founded and trained by the training dataset. A test method is used in which the gesture will be recognized when recognized label times reach the threshold of activation times by the ANN classifier. In the experiment, we collected real sEMG data from twelve subjects and used a set of five gestures from each subject to evaluate our model, with an average recognition rate of 98.7% and an average response time of 227.76 ms, which is only one-third of the gesture time. Therefore, the pattern recognition system might be able to recognize a gesture before the gesture is completed.