Surface Electromyography

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35 papers3 papers in the last four weeks, down 50% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Nov 5, 2026

Do sEMG Foundation Models Improve Cross-Subject Generalisation?

sEMG Foundation Models aim to learn general purpose representations over diverse subjects and recording conditions that boost performance on a variety of downstream tasks. However, existing evaluations make it difficult to discern whether pretraining alone is sufficient to combat the cross-subject overfitting which makes machine learning on sEMG so challenging. We conduct a systematic evaluation of three sEMG foundation models across three gesture classification datasets under both intra-session and inter-subject splits, using three fine-tuning strategies designed to isolate the contribution of pretraining. We find that pretraining boosts performance when train and test samples are drawn from the same recording session, but this benefit largely disappears under inter-subject evaluation. In low subject count datasets, pretraining provides little to no benefit and classical ML baselines match or exceed foundation model performance.

William Raftery, Dario Farina

Imperial College London

Cross-Subject Generalization Surface Electromyography EMG-Based Gesture Recognition

Nov 2, 2026

Feature extraction for LSTM-based finger-joint angle estimation from sEMG

Continuous estimation of finger-joint angles from surface electromyography (sEMG) is a promising approach for controlling dexterous myoelectric prostheses. Deep time series models have been applied successfully in this context, typically relying on feature extraction rather than raw signals, given limited subject-specific data. Various time-domain and frequency-domain features can be used, extracted for a given window and step size. This study systematically investigates these three design choices for Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) regression on the Ninapro DB2 dataset. Window sizes from 300 to 1200 ms and step sizes from 10 to 100 ms were evaluated in combination with six time- and frequency-domain features. Models were evaluated using regression performance metrics, inference time, and memory footprint to assess feasibility on embedded microcontroller hardware suitable for a prosthetic device. A 300 ms window with a 100 ms step, paired with either the Mean Absolute Value (MAV) or Root Mean Squared (RMS) feature, yielded the best performance (test PCC of 0.779 +/- 0.080 / 0.779 +/- 0.085). Window size, step size, and feature choice were found to interact non-trivially: jointly tuning them can improve both accuracy and computational feasibility for real-time, embedded myoelectric control.

Gerda de Jager, Marelie H Davel, Ian Thomson

Faculty of Engineering, North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa · Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research, South Africa · National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences, South Africa

Surface Electromyography

Oct 23, 2026

EMG Tokenization Preserves Movement Information at a Fraction of the Bitrate

Wireless electromyography (EMG) interfaces must balance electrode coverage against transmission bandwidth. Here, we show that compact EMG tokens substantially reduce payload while retaining information for three-dimensional hand-pose decoding. We evaluate two causal tokenizers fitted without pose labels: an encoder pretrained to reconstruct EMG spectra and one based on SPAR, an engineered spectral-spatial representation of neighbouring electrodes. In personalized, within-session experiments with 320-channel EMG from nine participants, we compare tokenized and continuous features using matched decoder architectures and training procedures. Averaged across decoders, tokenization changed mean error by +0.01 mm for SPAR (95% confidence interval: -0.12 to 0.14) and +0.45 mm for the learned representation (0.10 to 0.82). Both increases met a 1 mm non-inferiority criterion. Stored token arrays reduced payloads 41-fold relative to raw EMG and 36-fold relative to continuous SPAR features. On sampled windows of the public emg2pose benchmark's test partition, absolute differences in mean error between learned tokens and continuous features were below 0.05 mm across 176 participants and in the subset of 20 participants unseen during training. Electrode coverage, calibration, and unseen recordings affected SPAR decoding more than quantization did. In a computational benchmark, optimized SPAR generated tokens for 63 channels within 20 ms on a Cortex-M55 microcontroller. These findings support tokenization as a compact interface between wearable sensing and movement decoding, allowing decoders to be updated while the wearable encoder and transmitted representation remain fixed.

Raul C. Sîmpetru, Amin Olamazadeh, Devon Rohlf +2

Department of Artificial Intelligence in Biomedical Engineering, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 91052 Erlangen, Germany

Time Series Tokenization Surface Electromyography

Oct 17, 2026

Is User Calibration Still Necessary for Continuous Myoelectric Control? A Closed-Loop Comparison of Calibration-Free Controllers

The need for user-specific calibration remains an often-cited barrier to widespread adoption of myoelectric control. Cross-user models trained on large multi-user datasets can now recognize gestures from unseen users without calibration, but they have been evaluated almost exclusively offline, leaving open whether calibration is still needed in closed-loop control. This study compared six calibration-free controllers, trained on 306 users of the EMG-EPN-612 dataset and used without any calibration data from the test participant, against three calibrated controllers in a closed-loop Fitts' law target-acquisition task with sixteen participants. The calibrated controllers achieved higher offline balanced accuracy (90.6% against 73.1% for the best controller of each paradigm), but completion rates did not differ significantly between paradigms, and the highest completion rate was achieved by a calibration-free controller. Calibrated controllers moved faster on successful acquisitions, partly because of their individually fitted speed mappings, though not significantly after correction for multiple comparisons. However, every calibration-free controller produced more direct and stable trajectories than every calibrated controller, even after adjusting for cursor speed. Offline accuracy did not predict completion rate across controllers or within participants, and across paradigms higher offline accuracy was associated with poorer trajectory quality in 15 of 16 participants. Without any calibration data from the end user, a model trained across a large population matched calibrated control in completion rate and exceeded it in trajectory quality. The offline accuracy gained through calibration should therefore not be taken as evidence of a closed-loop benefit.

Amir Reza Hariri, Kevin B. Englehart, Erik Scheme

Institute of Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB E3B 5A3, Canada.

Continuous Control EMG-Based Gesture Recognition Surface Electromyography

Oct 6, 2026

Neuromotor Hierarchy Network: Physiological Inductive Biases for Robust Generalization in sEMG Decoding

Surface electromyography (sEMG) provides a wearable, noninvasive interface to neuromuscular activity for movement decoding and human-computer interaction. Population-scale decoding remains difficult because the relationship between sEMG and neuromuscular activity varies across users and sessions, while task-relevant dynamics span channels and multiple timescales. Learning waveform-to-output mappings from task labels leaves the distinction between recording variability and coordinated motor activity implicit. We introduce the Neuromotor Hierarchy Network (NHN), which learns a compact latent neuromotor state from task supervision to represent task-relevant neuromuscular coordination. NHN constructs this latent state through a hierarchy inspired by neuromotor organization. It adapts recording statistics while preserving relative intensity. Its spatiotemporal encoder uses parameter-efficient channel interactions and modulates features with multi-timescale history. The resulting features yield candidate activations of learned motor primitives, which are temporally integrated and continuously weighted to form the state. Theoretical analysis characterizes the efficiency, temporal behavior, and optimization of NHN's core mechanisms. We evaluate the architecture for both continuous hand-pose estimation on emg2pose and touch-typing recognition on emg2qwerty. On emg2pose, NHN reduces user-averaged angular error by 0.52% to 2.84% across all three generalization splits in both Regression and Tracking relative to Hadidi et al.'s best task-specific variants, using 48.42% to 48.51% fewer parameters. On emg2qwerty, NHN reduces beam-search character error rate by 19.40% zero-shot and 30.42% after fine-tuning relative to SplashNet-Upscale, using 65.86% fewer parameters. Physiology-guided inference of a latent neuromotor state supports parameter-efficient sEMG decoding.

He Wang, Hongyuan Qi, Zhaoxian Zhang +4

National University of Singapore

Neural Decoding State Representation Learning Surface Electromyography

Oct 4, 2026

EMG-GPT: Predictive Pretraining on Residual-Quantized EMG Tokens for Hand Pose Estimation

Surface electromyography (sEMG) is a low-power, cost-effective biosignal for hand-pose estimation and gesture classification. In this work, we examine whether self-supervised pretraining on sEMG can yield transferable representations for continuous hand-pose estimation. We introduce EMG-GPT, a causal transformer-based model that operates on discrete sEMG representations from a frozen residual vector quantization (RVQ) tokenizer and learns temporal dynamics through depth-autoregressive future-code prediction. The model combines within-frame integration with causal temporal modeling while preserving the geometry of the pretrained codebook. EMG-GPT shows competitive results in both Regression and Tracking tasks, supporting EMG-only pretraining as a viable approach for learning transferable sEMG representations.

Ettore Magni, Rolandos Alexandros Potamias, Stefanos Zafeiriou +1

Imperial College London

Representation Learning Self-Supervised Time Series Representation Learning Predictive Representation Learning Surface Electromyography

Sep 30, 2026

EFormer: Temporally Aligned Local Correction for Continuous sEMG-Based Hand Pose Tracking

Surface electromyography (sEMG) provides a wearable, camera-free signal for continuous hand-motion inference. Mapping muscle activity to joint kinematics remains challenging because the recorded waveforms are indirect measurements, their relationship with motion changes over time, and individual anatomy and sensor placement alter the signal distribution. This paper presents EFormer, a residual feature-correction network built on a frozen tracking backbone. EFormer combines a high-rate event branch, temporally aligned local cross-attention, two causal rotary position embedding (RoPE) temporal layers, and a bounded, dynamically gated residual. EFormer receives 16-channel sEMG sampled at 2 kHz and fuses a 64-channel tracking representation at 25 Hz with a 128-channel event representation at 200 Hz. Cross-attention uses a nominal delay of 100 ms, a 300 ms history parameter, and a 50 ms tolerance; its causal mask restricts each query to events occurring 50-400 ms earlier. The correction scale is 0.15. The evaluated continuation-training configuration contains 585,376 trainable parameters and 5,974,508 frozen parameters. On the test set, EFormer achieves an MAE of 0.1546634 rad, an RMSE of 0.24063 rad, and an R^2 of 0.74801, compared with 0.1745326 rad, 0.2715448 rad, and 0.6791103 for the official tracking baseline. EFormer reduces MAE by 11.38% relative to the baseline. The results show that temporally aligned event-feature correction can reduce continuous hand-pose tracking error.

JiaCheng Ge, SiYu Zhang

3D Hand Pose Estimation Surface Electromyography

Sep 22, 2026

EMGBlend: Heterogeneity-Aware Self-Supervised Pretraining for Gesture and Force Decoding

Public surface electromyography (EMG) datasets vary widely in electrode layout, channel count, frequency support, and size. Simply mixing them for pretraining can misalign channel semantics, introduce spectral targets that some devices cannot observe, and let large or high-channel-count datasets dominate learning. We introduce EMGBlend, a self-supervised framework designed around these differences. It combines shared channel patches with geometry-aware attention, restricts spectral targets to each recording's supported frequency band, and balances exposure across data sources. We pretrain a 109M-parameter model on 11 public EMG sources and evaluate it on gesture recognition, continuous-force regression, and contact classification. EMGBlend consistently outperforms matched random initialization and waveform reconstruction controls. Fixed-budget source controls show that multi-source pretraining improves gesture recognition and remains competitive for force decoding. Ablations confirm that geometry, band-aware targets, and source balancing each contribute to transfer, although cross-person NinaPro force estimation remains difficult. Overall, EMGBlend shows how heterogeneous EMG datasets can be combined through explicit mechanism design rather than simple concatenation. Code is available at https://github.com/tamanano/EMGBlend

Yuwei Jia, Cheng Zhong, Jinyang Yu +1

Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China · Dexwise, China · Shenzhen University, China

EMG-Based Gesture Recognition Self-Supervised Pre-Training Self-Supervised Time Series Representation Learning Transfer Learning Surface Electromyography

Sep 15, 2026

MyoFlow: Anchor-Tied Rectified Flow for HD-sEMG Gesture Recognition Across Sessions and Subjects

High-density surface electromyography (HD-sEMG) gesture recognition supports prosthetic control, assistive robotics, and rehabilitation, but electrode re-donning and physiological variability cause distribution shifts that degrade accuracy across sessions and subjects. Generative HD-sEMG models primarily synthesize signals for augmentation; although diffusion models enhance representation learning, prediction still relies on a separate classifier. To tie learned dynamics to the decision rule, we propose MyoFlow, the first discriminative flow-matching framework for HD-sEMG recognition across sessions and subjects. It recasts classification as anchor-tied transport: a domain-conditioned rectified flow moves encoded windows toward gesture anchors that serve as transport targets and define the nearest-anchor decision geometry, enabling zero-shot recognition without an independent head. On the Hyser dataset, MyoFlow improves mean cross-session and cross-subject accuracy over the strongest diffusion-based baseline by 4.24% and 6.37%, respectively, and achieves 91.71% mean zero-shot accuracy and 97.39% mean few-shot accuracy across multiple days on the CEMHSEY dataset.

Chenhao Wu, Dingjie Peng, Zhihe Zhang +6

Waseda University, Japan · KDDI Research Inc., Japan · The University of Manchester, UK

EMG-Based Gesture Recognition Flow Matching Rectified Flow Domain Generalization Surface Electromyography

Sep 11, 2026

Prism-SQA: An Interpretable and Adaptable Neural Framework for Surface Electromyography Quality Assessment

sEMG is vulnerable to various contaminants that distort signal morphology and spectral content. Accurate signal quality assessment (SQA) is essential for identifying such degradation and ensuring reliable clinical analyses and decisions. Recent neural network-based SQA methods achieve accurate quality estimation by learning complex contamination patterns, yet their black-box nature prevents clinicians from understanding or validating the reported scores and limits adaptability to application-specific quality definitions without retraining. To address these limitations, we propose Prism-SQA, an interpretable and adaptable neural framework that reformulates SQA as a physiology-aware source-separation and verification process. Prism-SQA decomposes each input signal into a clean sEMG component and five contaminant-specific components using a U-Net with bidirectional long short-term memory. Each separated contaminant component is examined by a Contaminant Fingerprint Verifier, which enforces physiological plausibility by comparing its temporal and spectral structure with canonical contaminant signatures. This design allows clinicians to inspect how each contaminant affects signal quality, grounding the assessment in transparent, signal-level evidence rather than opaque latent representations. Quality indices computed from the verified components further enable customization of quality criteria across clinical contexts without retraining. We evaluate Prism-SQA on continuous quality-score estimation using synthesized noisy sEMG from public Ninapro datasets and on binary quality classification using a clinical dysphagia dataset. Results show that Prism-SQA achieves competitive or better performance than contemporary black-box neural methods while providing explicit interpretability and adaptability, advancing toward practical and clinically aligned sEMG SQA.

Kuan-Chen Wang, Kai-Chun Liu, Ping-Cheng Yeh +2

Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taiwan · Department of Biomedical Engineering, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan · Institute of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan +2

Surface Electromyography Neural Network Interpretability

Sep 9, 2026

Deep Neural Networks for Learning Intent from sEMG Signals to Support Hardware Devices for Post-Stroke Neurorehabilitation

Finger-specific motor intent is a clinically meaningful control signal for post-stroke neurorehabilitation, where residual muscle activity may remain measurable despite weak or incomplete movement. We study five-finger multilabel intent decoding from impaired-arm high-density surface electromyography (sEMG) in PhysioMio, a bilateral longitudinal dataset collected from stroke patients. A common processing protocol aligns movement labels, applies 20--450 Hz Butterworth filtering and Symlet-4 wavelet denoising, segments overlapping 200 ms windows, and extracts twelve time- and frequency-domain descriptors per channel. Direct LSTM, CNN, and GNN baselines reveal complementary behavior: the LSTM attains the highest subset accuracy (0.545), whereas the GNN attains the highest macro F1 (0.706) and macro AUPRC (0.776). Architecture search then identifies CNN-Large as the strongest single-split CNN, with 0.593 subset accuracy and 0.714 macro F1, while CNN-Micro provides a compact architecture for embedded inference. To match a four-sensor hardware design, we retrain CNN-Micro using channels associated with ECRB, ECRL, FDS, and FDP and exclude the ground electrode from model input. Across five seeds, cross-channel knowledge distillation improves the four-channel student over direct training, reaching

0.5219 \pm 0.0114

subset accuracy,

0.7612 \pm 0.0038

finger accuracy, and

0.6095 \pm 0.0058

macro F1. The selected 123K-parameter model accepts nine windows of 48 features and has been exported to ONNX. These results establish a reproducible software path from post-stroke sEMG to compact five-finger intent prediction for subsequent hardware-in-the-loop evaluation.

Zakariyya Brewster, Divy Wadhwani, Emily Yan +5

Department of Engineering Science University of Toronto · Computer and Mathematical Sciences University of Toronto Scarborough · Department of Computer Science University of Toronto +3

EMG-Based Gesture Recognition Surface Electromyography

Jul 30, 2026

Recognition and Label-Free Adaptation Across Recording Sessions in Surface-EMG Gesture Decoding

Recognition accuracy obtained during a recording session does not persist when a user puts on the electrodes again after the electrodes had previously been removed. The electrodes may have moved slightly, the skin may be drier or wetter, or the elbow may be positioned differently; these factors all contribute to day-to-day variability and therefore represent a major obstacle to implementing successful pattern-recognition based myoelectric control systems in daily practice. However, simply recalibrating a user's hand for 20 min at every doff/don event is a clearly unrealistic expectation. A montage-agnostic encoder built for cross-user, cross-montage transfer is trained here using data collected during a particular recording session, and then applied to data collected later in a different recording session without adjusting anything, on the ten intact subjects of NinaPro DB6. The performance of this approach is compared to that of a per-user LDA classification pipeline, and to that of two published approaches that only rely on source data collected from the same recording session. Carried unchanged across recording sessions, the encoder retains 0.688 macro-F1 against 0.540 for the per-user pipeline, and, on the per-window metric the published baselines use, sits above both published source-only results, a band of two points that locates the encoder rather than ranking it. Of five label-free test-time adaptations, only feature-statistic alignment improves every subject; batch-normalisation re-estimation, a standard method in the domain-adaptation literature, collapses this architecture entirely. Aligning the encoder's feature statistics to the new session recovers about what a single labelled calibration repetition would.

Jethro Odeyemi, W. J. Zhang

Division of Biomedical Engineering, University of Saskatchewan, 57 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK, S7N 5A9, Canada

EMG-Based Gesture Recognition Test-Time Adaptation Domain Adaptation Representation Alignment Surface Electromyography

Jul 30, 2026

A Montage-Agnostic Encoder for Calibration-Light Cross-User Gesture Recognition from Surface Electromyography

Pattern-recognition control promises a myoelectric prosthesis that responds to many intended gestures rather than one or two, but the promise has stayed in the laboratory. A recogniser trained on one person rarely transfers to the next, and useful performance usually demands a fresh round of labelled calibration from the end user. A montage-agnostic encoder is introduced that reads each electrode with shared weights and locates it by its physical coordinate rather than its index, so one architecture ingests any channel count without montage-specific parameters. Trained across users, it exceeds a per-user Hudgins and linear-discriminant classifier by 0.234 macro-F1 on DB1 for every held-out subject and by 0.108 on DB2, and falls below it on the ten-subject DB5. Each of the encoder's three key components individually accounts for more than half of its 3-shot macro F1 in an otherwise budget-matched ablation study. A controlled subject-count sweep shows the margin is close to flat from nine training subjects to thirty-nine, so the training pool binds only as a stability floor below which cross-user training fails to converge; what tracks the direction of the comparison across the three databases is instead the strength of the per-user baseline, which signal fidelity sets. Comparing against an LDA baseline depends on budget spent training models and on how good that baseline is, and self-supervised pretraining had no benefits once a supervised model was adequately trained.

Jethro Odeyemi, W. J. Zhang

Division of Biomedical Engineering, University of Saskatchewan, 57 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK, S7N 5A9, Canada

EMG-Based Gesture Recognition Few-Shot Learning Invariant Representation Learning Surface Electromyography

Jul 28, 2026

Prototype Adaptation for Zero-Shot sEMG Movement Classification

Surface electromyography (sEMG) enables the control of prostheses, allowing upper-limb amputees to re-gain some hand function. Most current research focuses on recognizing basic movements for prosthesis control. However, in most daily activities, such as opening a door, combined movements are essential. However, collecting training data for all possible combined movements is time-consuming and requires re-training of the model for any new combination. We propose two novel recognition approaches, Compositional Prototype Interpolation (CPI) and Synthetic Adaptation for Prototypes (SAP), that enable zero-shot learning of combined, novel and unseen movements in Prototype Networks after training only with basic movements. Our methods rest on a linear interpolation assumption in the embedding space, which we study by inspecting the geometry of combined motions in signal and embedding space. In experiments on the NearLab and NinaPro DB3 data sets as well as our newly recorded BasCom dataset, our proposed SAP outperforms prior zero-shot learning methods with accuracy improvements on combined movements of more than 20%. This advantage is maintained in online inference experiments in a user study.

Rui Liu, Benjamin Paassen

Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University

EMG-Based Gesture Recognition Zero-Shot Learning Prototype Learning Surface Electromyography

Jul 6, 2026

KinEMbed: Decoding Kinematics from Electromyography via Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning

Decoding hand kinematics from surface electromyography (EMG) is a core challenge in wearable biosignal processing with clinical relevance for prosthetic control and motor rehabilitation. Most representation learning approaches for EMG focus on discrete gesture classification, and few focus on continuous regression. We present KinEMbed, a cross-modal contrastive learning framework for hand kinematics regression that jointly trains dual encoders -- one for windowed EMG features and one for kinematic (joint angle) targets. The resulting embeddings inherit the geometric structure of the kinematic space without requiring kinematic signals at inference time. Evaluating on the NinaPro DB8 dataset that includes both able-bodied users and subjects with limb difference (N=11), KinEMbed outperforms PCA, PLS, autoencoder and contrastive (CEBRA) baselines on held-out sessions, with largest gains on the most challenging thumb degrees of articulation. We position this work as a first step toward contrastive representation learning for regression of hand kinematics from structured wearable biosignals.

Sofia Gilardini, Chenfei Ma, Kianoush Nazarpour

Department of Statistics, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom · School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Cross-Modal Representation Learning Multimodal Contrastive Learning Surface Electromyography

Jun 26, 2026

Applicability of memorization indicators for early spotting of overfitting while recalibrating sEMG-decoders on low sample sizes

Deep learning models for surface electromyography (sEMG) can benefit substantially from subject-specific (re-)calibration, since no sufficiently large and diverse datasets are available to train fully generic decoders. However, for user acceptance, the number of repetitions that can realistically be collected during calibration is severely limited, which increases the risk of overfitting and, in extreme cases, can even degrade performance compared to the uncalibrated model. Classical overfitting indicators such as validation performance and regularization with early stopping are difficult to apply in this low-sample regime, as they require additional held-out data that is rarely available in practical calibration scenarios. In this work, we investigate a recently proposed class of memorization indicators based solely on the activation statistics of rectified linear units (ReLU) in deep neural networks, which can be computed directly from training data without any extra validation set. We conduct a transferlearning experiment on a benchmark sEMG dataset, where a convolutional neural network is first pre-trained on multiple subjects and subsequently fine-tuned on individual users using only a small number of repetitions. During calibration, we monitor both decoding performance and the activation behaviour of the last hidden layer. Our results provide first evidence that decreases in test accuracy during fine-tuning are ac companied by characteristic changes in activation rates, indicating that activation-based memorization indicators are a promising tool for early spotting of unsuccessful learning in low-sample sEMG calibration settings.

Stephan J. Lehmler, Tobias Glasmachers, Ioannis Iossifidis

German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute for AI Safety and Security, Ulm, Germany · Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany · Institute for Neural Computation, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany +1

Neural Network Generalization Neural Decoding Neural Network Memorization Model Calibration Data-Efficient Learning Surface Electromyography

Jun 24, 2026

ForceBand: Learning Forceful Manipulation with sEMG

Human demonstrations are a scalable data source for learning robot manipulation policies. However, common sources of human demonstration data, such as motion-capture trajectories and internet videos, capture mostly motion and appearance while missing the contact forces that are critical for force-sensitive manipulation. In this paper, we introduce ForceBand, a low-cost wrist-worn sEMG system that turns human muscle activity into force-enriched demonstrations. We first collect a 10-hour multimodal dataset containing egocentric video, sEMG, IMU, and fingertip force measurements across diverse actions and objects. Using this dataset, we pre-train an EMG2Force model that predicts per-finger forces from sEMG and IMU signals. After a short user-specific calibration, users can collect target-task demonstrations using only ForceBand and video; EMG2Force then labels these demonstrations with per-finger force traces, producing force-augmented demonstrations for robot policy learning. Experiments show that ForceBand recovers fine-grained fingertip interactions with over 50% lower force prediction error than vision-based baselines and achieves an 87% success rate on pick, squeeze, and place tasks that require object-specific force control across objects with diverse shapes, sizes, and weights. Project website: https://forceband-emg.github.io

Botao He, Zhi Wang, Linna Kuang +8

Amazon FAR · University of Maryland · Johns Hopkins University

Robot Skill Learning Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Robotic Data Collection Force-Controlled Robotic Manipulation Robot Imitation Learning Robotic Manipulation+2

Jun 22, 2026

Integrated Sensing and Communications for Real-time Avatar Control in XR over 5G

Extended Reality (XR) presents a challenging use case for 5G and 6G networks, requiring high data-rates and lowlatency communication to deliver a truly immersive experience. Moreover, in order to seamlessly translate physical actions to the virtual world, accurate gesture recognition and pose estimation are required. Current XR interaction solutions based on handheld controllers and cameras cannot easily capture full-body poses, inhibit the free use of hands, and require good visibility and a clear line of sight. In this work, we propose a multimodal sensing architecture for XR that combines 5G MillimeterWave (mmWave) Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) and surface electromyography (sEMG) signals. 5G mmWave ISAC cannot only be used to deliver content wirelessly to the Head-mounted display (HMD), but also the same communication signals can be used to derive coarse body-level gestures and poses of the user, to support real-time avatar control. For fine-grained finger-level gestures, our architecture leverages lightweight sEMG sensors that capture forearm muscle activity. To illustrate the need of both modalities, we present evaluations of both sensing technologies. At the body level (5G), our architecture relies on power-per-beam-pair (PPBP), which can be computed from standard beam management or beam sweeping procedures of the 5G NR standard. PPBP-based sensing achieves 82.2

\pm

5.9% average accuracy when evaluated on users not seen during training. For fine-grained finger-level interactions, we show that surface electromyography (sEMG) carries strong discriminative information achieving consistent promising performance across different movement settings. Thus, combining the two modalities enables multi-scale gesture recognition, at the body level via existing 5G signals and finger level via lightweight sEMG sensors, forming a complete XR framework.

Nabeel Nisar Bhat, Javad Sameri, Rreze Halili +3

IDLab, University of Antwerp - imec, Antwerp, Belgium · IDLab, Ghent University - imec, Ghent, Belgium · Light and Lighting Technology Lab, KU Leuven, Ghent, Belgium

Integrated Sensing and Communication Surface Electromyography Wireless Communications Gesture Recognition Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jun 5, 2026

Physiologically Constrained Musculoskeletal Neural Network for Multi-DoF Joint Kinematics Estimation from Partially Observed sEMG

This paper investigates multi-degrees of freedom (DoF) joint kinematics estimation under partially observed surface electromyography (sEMG), where only a subset of task-relevant muscles can be measured due to anatomical inaccessibility or sensor constraints. A novel musculoskeletal neural network (MSK-NN) is proposed to estimate multi-DoF joint angles while simultaneously inferring activations for both measured and unmeasured muscles. MSK-NN consists of a CNN-based muscle activation estimator and an embedded MSK forward dynamics module, forming a fully differentiable architecture. Unlike existing hybrid neural frameworks that require additional biomechanical labels (e.g., muscle-tendon forces, joint torques), MSK-NN is trained without direct supervision of internal biomechanical variables. A composite physics-physiology loss is designed by incorporating a joint kinematics loss, a data-driven muscle synergy loss, and an anatomy-guided trend loss. The proposed method is evaluated on two-DoF wrist kinematics estimation across three rhythmic motions with unconstrained speed and amplitude, and one random motion. Compared with CNN, Bi-LSTM, CNN-LSTM, and PET baselines, MSK-NN achieves lower normalized root mean square error (NRMSE) and higher coefficient of determination (R2), especially for the random motion. More importantly, the optimized MSK parameters remain within physiological limits, and the estimated activation of an input-excluded muscle exhibits strong temporal agreement with its recorded sEMG envelope, demonstrating the capability of musculoskeletal (MSK)-NN to recover physiologically plausible activations.

Wending Heng, Mingming Zhang, Glen Cooper +1

University of Manchester · 2Southern University of Science and Technology

Surface Electromyography Physics-Informed ML Musculoskeletal Modeling

May 29, 2026

MyoSem: Aligning Electromyography with Natural-Language Action Semantics

Electromyography (EMG) records muscle activation for hand gesture recognition, prosthetic control, and wearable interaction. Existing EMG methods usually formulate hand action understanding as prediction over fixed gesture labels, leaving EMG signals and action-semantic text unaligned in a common feature space and limiting bidirectional querying between signals and hand-action descriptions. We present MyoSem, an EMG--action semantic alignment framework that maps hand EMG and multi-view natural-language action descriptions into a shared feature space for retrieval. MyoSem builds semantic prototypes from multi-view descriptions, encodes EMG with local activation-aware representations, and uses semantic queries to aggregate local EMG evidence for bidirectional EMG--text retrieval. We evaluate MyoSem under seven protocols on NinaPro DB2, EMG2Pose, and NinaPro DB2

\rightarrow

DB3, covering random splits, user shifts, held-out action classes, and able-bodied-to-amputee transfer. Across this evaluation, MyoSem achieves the strongest overall bidirectional retrieval performance among the evaluated methods. Ablations and representation analyses show how semantic prototypes, activation-aware encoding, and semantic queries shape the learned space. Overall, MyoSem moves EMG hand action understanding from fixed-label recognition toward language-queryable semantic retrieval.

Chiyue Wang, Yang Gao, Zhanpeng Jin

South China University of Technology

EMG-Based Gesture Recognition Multimodal Embedding Gesture Recognition Surface Electromyography

May 8, 2026

Estimation of Motor Unit Parameters from Surface Electromyograms using an Informed Autoencoder

Motor unit parameters such as the innervation zone centre or the conduction velocity of the electrical potential harbour the potential to improve the fidelity of neuromechanical models used for movement and force prediction. Determining these parameters in a non-invasive way is challenging, as they are subject-specific and may vary with muscle contraction. Existing work on the estimation of motor unit parameters mainly relies on white-box modelling and therefore requires substantial manual modelling effort. This work targets the simultaneous estimation of multiple subject-specific motor unit parameters from electromyography (EMG) recordings measured non-invasively at the skin surface. This results in an inverse problem with a nonlinear loss function. To address this problem, an informed autoencoder is developed. This autoencoder reconstructs the surface EMG recordings while learning the parameters in its latent space and adhering to physical laws that relate the parameters to the EMG signals. In experiments on synthetic data, innervation zone centres are estimated with a mean absolute error of 2.5989

\mathrm{mm}

, and conduction velocities of the electric potential are estimated with a mean absolute error of 0.1697

\mathrm{m}\mathrm{s}^{-1}

. These results demonstrate the plausibility of this novel approach, which enables the simultaneous estimation of several motor unit parameters while reducing manual modelling effort through the integration of data-driven machine learning.

Kaja Balzereit, Malte Mechtenberg, Axel Schneider

Hochschule Bielefeld, University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Institute for System Dynamics

Parameter Estimation Surface Electromyography

May 7, 2026

EgoEMG: A Multimodal Egocentric Dataset with Bilateral EMG and Vision for Hand Pose Estimation

Surface electromyography (sEMG) records muscle activity during hand movement and can be decoded to recover detailed hand articulation. EMG and egocentric vision are complementary for hand sensing: EMG captures fine-grained finger articulation even under occlusion and poor lighting, while vision provides global hand configuration. However, no existing dataset synchronizes both modalities. We present EgoEMG, a multimodal egocentric dataset for bimanual hand pose estimation. EgoEMG includes bilateral wristband EMG with 16 total channels (8 per wrist) sampled at 2 kHz, 120 Hz IMU, egocentric wide-angle RGB video, external RGB-D video, and mocap-derived hand motion with wrist articulation angles. The dataset covers 41 participants performing 60 gesture classes, including 30 single-hand gestures and 30 bimanual gestures, totaling more than 10 hours of recording. We also introduce a benchmark with three tasks -- EMG-to-pose, vision-to-pose, and EMG+vision fusion -- under a shared joint-angle prediction target and common generalization split axes (cross-gesture, cross-user, and combined). As baselines, we evaluate EMGFormer for EMG-to-pose and generic ResNet/ViT backbones for vision-to-pose. We further study a residual fusion architecture that improves over matched lightweight vision-only baselines. Together, EgoEMG and its benchmark establish a foundation for future research on multimodal hand pose estimation with EMG and vision.

Ziheng Xi, Jiayi Yu, Yitao Wang +3

Department of Automation, Tsinghua University

EMG-Based Gesture Recognition 3D Hand Pose Estimation Multimodal Fusion Surface Electromyography

May 5, 2026

From Muscle Bursts to Motor Intent: Self-Supervised Token Modeling for Heterogeneous EMG

Surface electromyography provides a practical way to infer human movement intention from wearable muscle recordings, but models trained under a single acquisition setting often lose reliability when the user, session, electrode layout, or gesture protocol changes. This paper proposes AEMG, a self-supervised learning approach designed to extract reusable neuromuscular representations from diverse EMG sources. Eight public gesture datasets are first transformed into a shared signal format to reduce discrepancies in channel configuration, sensor topology, and recording protocol. Instead of relying on fixed-length sliding windows, AEMG identifies contraction events from energy variations and represents them as compact neuromuscular tokens, while ordered token groups describe the coordinated activity of multiple muscles during motion. A spatially and temporally conditioned Transformer is then used to encode these token sequences, preserving information about electrode position, activation timing, and sequential structure. For pre-training, the model constructs a discrete library of contraction prototypes through vector-quantized reconstruction and further learns contextual dependencies by recovering masked neuromuscular tokens from surrounding observations. Experiments under leave-one-subject-out and low-label adaptation settings show that the learned representation improves robustness to unseen users and reduces the amount of calibration data required for gesture recognition. These findings suggest that event-level token modeling offers a scalable route toward adaptable and data-efficient EMG-based motor-intent understanding.

Zhenghao Huang, Huilin Yao, Kaikai Wang

South China University of Technology

EMG-Based Gesture Recognition Cross-Subject Generalization Human Activity Recognition Self-Supervised Time Series Representation Learning Surface Electromyography

May 2, 2026

Continuous Temporal Representations of Event-Based Signals via Interference-Based Wave Modeling

Spatio-temporal signals arising from event-driven biological processes, such as surface electromyography (sEMG), exhibit asynchronous and highly structured activation patterns that are challenging to model using conventional discrete or purely real-valued representations. In this work, we propose a continuous temporal modeling framework based on interference-based wave representations. The approach maps event-like input signals into a complex-valued latent wave field, where temporal structure is encoded through phase modulation and interactions between latent components. By projecting the resulting wave field onto an energy domain, the model induces structured activation patterns that capture both temporal localization and relational dependencies within finite observation windows, without relying on explicit recurrence or causal state propagation. The proposed formulation is particularly suited for event-driven biosignals, where continuous representations enable efficient gradient-based optimization and robust feature extraction. In particular, the method is designed to support learning from sEMG data for downstream control tasks in biomechanical systems, such as prosthetic devices and exoskeletons. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed interference-based wave model provides improved representation quality compared to purely real-valued representations, while maintaining computational efficiency suitable for practical deployment.

Magnus Bengtsson

Department of Engineering, University of Borås, Borås, Sweden

Representation Learning Surface Electromyography Time Series Representation Learning

Apr 28, 2026

GEGLU-Transformer for IMU-to-EMG Estimation with Few-Shot Adaptation

Reliable estimation of neuromuscular activation is a key enabler for adaptive and personalized control in wearable robotics. However, surface electromyography (EMG) remains difficult to deploy robustly outside laboratory settings due to electrode sensitivity, signal non-stationarity, and strong subject dependence. In this work, we propose an adaptive IMU-to-EMG learning framework that reconstructs continuous muscle activation envelopes from wearable inertial measurements across heterogeneous movement conditions. The approach combines a Transformer encoder with Gaussian Error Gated Linear Units (GEGLU-Transformer) to enhance cross-subject generalization and enable rapid subject-specific personalization. Under a strict leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) protocol on a multi-condition lower-limb biomechanics dataset, the proposed architecture achieves r = 0.706 +/- 0.139 and R^2 = 0.474 +/- 0.208 without subject-specific adaptation. With only 0.5% adaptation data, performance increases to r = 0.761 +/- 0.030 and R^2 = 0.559 +/- 0.047, demonstrating rapid adaptation and early performance saturation. These results support attention-based architectures combined with lightweight adaptation as a practical and scalable alternative to direct EMG sensing for real-world wearable robotic applications.

Miroljub Mihailovic, Luca Tonin, Stefano Tortora +1

Department of Information Engineering, University of Padua, 35131 Padua, Italy

Transformer Wearable Sensing Few-Shot Learning Adaptive Learning Surface Electromyography

Apr 20, 2026

Comparison of sEMG Encoding Accuracy Across Speech Modes Using Articulatory and Phoneme Features

We test whether Speech Articulatory Coding (SPARC) features can linearly predict surface electromyography (sEMG) envelopes across aloud, mimed, and subvocal speech in twenty-four subjects. Using elastic-net multivariate temporal response function (mTRF) with sentence-level cross-validation, SPARC yields higher prediction accuracy than phoneme one-hot representations on nearly all electrodes and in all speech modes. Aloud and mimed speech perform comparably, and subvocal speech remains above chance, indicating detectable articulatory activity. Variance partitioning shows a substantial unique contribution from SPARC and a minimal unique contribution from phoneme features. mTRF weight patterns reveal anatomically interpretable relationships between electrode sites and articulatory movements that remain consistent across modes. This study focuses on representation/encoding analysis (not end-to-end decoding) and supports SPARC as a robust and interpretable intermediate target for sEMG-based silent-speech modeling.

Chenqian Le, Ruisi Li, Beatrice Fumagalli +6

New York University, New York, NY, USA

Speech Processing Surface Electromyography

Apr 15, 2026

Bias in Surface Electromyography Features across a Demographically Diverse Cohort

Neuromotor decoding from upper-limb electromyography (sEMG) can enhance human-machine interfaces and offer a more natural means of controlling prosthetic limbs, virtual reality, and household electronics. Unfortunately, current sEMG technology does not always perform consistently across users because individual differences such as age and body mass index, among many others, can substantially alter signal quality. This variability makes sEMG characteristics highly idiosyncratic, often necessitating laborious personalization and iterative tuning to achieve reliable performance. This variability has particular import for sEMG-based assistive devices and neural interfaces, where demographic biases in sEMG features could undermine broad and fair deployment. In this study, we explore how demographic differences affect the sEMG signals produced and their implications for machine learning-based gesture decoding. We analyze the data set provided by, in which we derive 147 common sEMG features extracted from 81 demographically diverse individuals performing discrete hand gestures. Using mixed-effects linear models and partial least squares (PLS) analysis, which take into consideration demographic variables (including age, sex, height, weight, skin properties, subcutaneous fat, and hair density), we identify that 33% (49 of 147) of commonly used sEMG features show significant associations with demographic characteristics. These results may help guide the development of fair and unbiased sEMG-based neural interfaces across a diverse population.

Aditi Agrawal, Celine John Philip, Giancarlo K. Sagastume +5

Graduate Group in Computer Science, University of California, Davis · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Davis · Department of Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering and Advanced Manufacturing, California State University, Chico +6

Surface Electromyography EMG-Based Gesture Recognition

Apr 3, 2026

Cross-subject Muscle Fatigue Detection via Adversarial and Supervised Contrastive Learning with Inception-Attention Network

Muscle fatigue detection plays an important role in physical rehabilitation. Previous researches have demonstrated that sEMG offers superior sensitivity in detecting muscle fatigue compared to other biological signals. However, features extracted from sEMG may vary during dynamic contractions and across different subjects, which causes unstability in fatigue detection. To address these challenges, this research proposes a novel neural network comprising an Inception-attention module as a feature extractor, a fatigue classifier and a domain classifier equipped with a gradient reversal layer. The integrated domain classifier encourages the network to learn subject-invariant common fatigue features while minimizing subject-specific features. Furthermore, a supervised contrastive loss function is also employed to enhance the generalization capability of the model. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieved outstanding performance in three-class classification tasks, reaching 93.54% accuracy, 92.69% recall and 92.69% F1-score, providing a robust solution for cross-subject muscle fatigue detection, offering significant guidance for rehabilitation training and assistance.

Zitao Lin, Chang Zhu, Wei Meng

School of Information Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430070, China

Surface Electromyography

Mar 27, 2026

FatigueFormer: A Physiology-Informed Model for Upper-Limb Muscle Fatigue Assessment

Surface electromyographic (sEMG) signals provide information about muscle activity and function during movement. Fatigue alters multiple properties of these signals, with patterns that vary across individuals and contraction intensities. However, physiological insights into fatigue remain underused in sEMG modeling, particularly for cross-subject recognition. We introduce FatigueFormer to recognize fatigue states defined by ratings of perceived exertion (RPE). The model incorporates physiologically motivated trend grouping into sEMG encoding by organizing descriptors into increasing- and decreasing-trend streams and combining inter-window context with within-window feature interactions. To assess fatigue-state discriminability across contraction intensities, we further present an sEMG fatigue dataset collected from 30 participants at four levels of maximum voluntary contraction (MVC) and benchmark representative machine learning and deep learning methods. We evaluate performance offline under leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) and within-subject protocols and use the SWIFTIES dataset for external validation. Results support FatigueFormer's effectiveness across the examined contraction intensities and both datasets, while indicating that fatigue-related cues vary across MVC levels. An exploratory adaptation analysis shows higher FatigueFormer scores with more labeled target-user data on complete target recordings, which include calibration samples.

Tong Zhang, Hong Guo, Shuangzhou Yan +3

Zhejiang University

Surface Electromyography Feature Fusion

Mar 12, 2026

Affect Decoding in Phonated and Silent Speech Production from Surface EMG

The expression of affect is integral to spoken communication, yet, its link to underlying articulatory execution remains unclear. Measures of articulatory muscle activity such as EMG could reveal how speech production is modulated by emotion alongside acoustic speech analyses. We investigate affect decoding from facial and neck surface electromyography (sEMG) during phonated and silent speech production. For this purpose, we introduce a dataset comprising 2,780 utterances from 12 participants across 3 tasks, on which we evaluate both intra- and inter-subject decoding using a range of features and model embeddings. Our results reveal that EMG representations reliably discriminate frustration with up to 0.845 AUC, and generalize well across articulation modes. Our ablation study further demonstrates that affective signatures are embedded in facial motor activity and persist in the absence of phonation, highlighting the potential of EMG sensing for affect-aware silent speech interfaces.

Simon Pistrosch, Kleanthis Avramidis, Zhao Ren +7

CHI – Chair of Health Informatics, TUM University Hospital, Munich, Germany · MCML – Munich Center for Machine Learning, Germany · SAIL – Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab, University of Southern California, USA +2

Surface Electromyography Speech Emotion Recognition Emotion Recognition Affective Computing