Prediction of long-term elbow flexion force intervals based on the informer model and electromyography

Abstract

Accurate and long-term prediction of elbow flexion force can be used to recognize the intended movement and help wearable power-assisted robots to improve control performance. Our study aimed to find a proper relationship between electromyography and flexion force. However, the existing methods must incorporate biomechanical models to produce accurate and timely predictions of flexion force. Elbow flexion force is largely determined by the contractile properties of muscles, and the relationship between flexion force and the motor function of muscles has to be thoroughly analyzed. Therefore, based on the investigation on the contributions of different muscles to the flexion force, original electromyography signals were decomposed into non-linear and non-stationary parts. We selected the mean absolute value (MAV) of the non-linear part and the variance of the non-stationary part as inputs for an Informer prediction model that does not require detailed a priori knowledge of biomechanical models and is optimized for processing time sequences. Finally, a long-term flexion force probability interval is proposed. The proposed framework performs well in predicting long-term flexion force and outperforms other state-of-the-art models when compared to experimental results.