DOI: 10.3390/bioengineering13080900 ISSN: 2306-5354

An Adaptive Multi-Representation Fusion Framework for EMG Pattern Recognition in Transradial Amputees

Ejay Nsugbe, Oluwarotimi W. Samuel

Electromyography (EMG)-based pattern recognition is a key enabling technology for intuitive upper-limb prosthetic control; however, amputee EMG signals show substantial intersubject variability and nonstationary characteristics, which can limit the effectiveness of conventional fixed feature representations. This study proposes an Adaptive Multi-Representation Fusion Framework that combines an enhanced Adaptive Linear Series Decomposition Learner (Adaptive LSDL) with Time-Domain Power Spectral Descriptors (TDPSD) for amputee movement classification. The proposed Adaptive LSDL extends conventional decomposition by using adaptive threshold-region optimization and multitransform signal analysis, enabling subject-specific identification of the most discriminative decomposition characteristics while preserving low computational complexity. The complementary properties of TDPSD and Adaptive LSDL are then exploited through feature-level fusion, producing a unified representation that captures both local temporal-spectral complexity and adaptive structural signal information. Experimental evaluation was conducted using the Ninapro DB3 dataset, comprising 11 transradial amputees, and a MYO armband amputee dataset, comprising 6 transradial amputees. Subject-specific five-fold cross-validation was performed using a Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) classifier. Adaptive LSDL consistently improved performance relative to the original fixed-threshold LSDL representation, while fusion improved classification accuracy for 7 of 11 DB3 amputees and 5 of 6 MYO amputees. The largest fusion gains reached 4.39 and 5.60 percentage points for the DB3 and MYO cohorts, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed framework demonstrated competitive performance relative to a lightweight real-time convolutional neural network benchmark while requiring substantially lower computational complexity. These findings indicate that adaptive decomposition and representation-level information fusion provide an effective approach for exploiting subject-specific neuromuscular information while remaining suitable for computationally efficient prosthetic control applications.

More from our Archive