An efficient approach for physical actions classification using surface EMG signals.

Physical actions classification of surface electromyography (sEMG) signal is required in applications like prosthesis, and robotic control etc. In this paper, tunable-Q factor wavelet transform (TQWT) based algorithm is proposed for the classification of physical actions such as clapping, hugging, bowing, handshaking, standing, running, jumping, waving, seating, and walking. sEMG signal is decomposed into sub-bands by TQWT. Various features are extracted from each different band and statistical analysis is performed. These features are fed into multi-class least squares support vector machine classifier using two non-linear kernel functions, morlet wavelet function, and radial basis function. The proposed method is an attempt for classifying physical actions using TQWT and its performance and results are promising and have high classification accuracy of 97.74% for sub-band eight with morlet kernel function. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.