Highly Intuitive 3-DOF Simultaneous and Proportional Myocontrol of Wrist and Hand

While simultaneous and proportional activation of multiple degrees of freedom (DOFs) is supported by novel prosthetic hands, there are still no commercial controllers to appropriately enable it. Here, we test a ridge regression based myocontrol method in two real-time scenarios: 13 subjects with an extended high-density EMG electrode set (192 channels) and 4 subjects with a reduced set of electrodes (16 channels). In each scenario, the algorithm was trained on 3 repetitions of single DOF motions (rest, wrist flexion/extension and rotation, and hand closing) and then subjects were asked to reach 24 on-screen goals consisting of one-DOF, two-DOF, and three-DOF targets. The results showed that participants were able to reach all types of targets and that their one-DOF success rate remained high despite the simultaneous control of multiple DoFs (95.9 ± 5.7 %). Moreover, the performance did not significantly change when reducing the number of electrodes (97.6 ± 4.5 % for 16 channels).