Differences in Perspective on Inertial Measurement Unit Sensor Integration in Myoelectric Control

Recent human computer-interaction (HCI) studies using electromyography (EMG) and inertial measurement units (IMUs) for upper-limb gesture recognition have claimed that inertial measurements alone result in higher classification accuracy than EMG. In biomedical research such as in prosthesis control, however, EMG remains the gold standard for providing gesture specific information, exceeding the performance of IMUs alone. This study, therefore, presents a preliminary investigation of these conflicting claims between these converging research fields. Previous claims from both fields were verified within this study using publicly available datasets. The conflicting claims were found to stem from differences in terminology and experimental design. Specifically, HCI studies were found to exploit positional variation to increase separation between similar hand gestures. Conversely, in clinical applications such as prosthetics, position invariant gestures are preferred.This work therefore suggests that future studies explicitly outline experimental approaches to better differentiate between gesture recognition approaches.