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CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSION The feature extraction methods using short time Thomson transform (STTT) offered better results than those by the temporal multiple windows methods for the six grasp types classification. It has the best performance for the classification in the presented work. The hit rate is 85.4% for the 300 ms EMG signals. The hit rates of STTT methods are about five percent higher than that of the multiple windows methods. Therefore the feature extraction methods based on power spectrum density estimation are suitable for the EMG pattern recognition. On the other hand, the temporal multiple windows methods are surprisingly good, despite the fact that the algorithms are simple. This means the energy of EMG has the most significant information for the classification. The multiple Slepian windows method obtained an optimal classification for the four grasp types classification 97.66% for 400 ms signals and 96.76% for 300 ms signals. The temporal multiple trapezoidal windows method has a fairly good hit rate. Furthermore, its algorithm has the lowest time cost among all the methods we implemented in this work. No superior performance is observed for the classification of four grasp types in the frequency approach in this work. However, the ultimate goal is to discriminate the six grasp types. We could not simply conclude that the temporal approach here is the better than frequency approach by the four grasps types results.

110 The short time Fourier transform (STFT) did not show an advantage in this work. The hit rates based on STFT are about ten percent lower than those of the STTT. The multiple windows methods are clearly better than STFT. There exist valuable information in the frequency domain. We use the moments as features in the spectral approach. The zero moment is the integral of the spectrum in the STFT and STTT. It is the energy of signal, which can be calculated in time domain in an alternated way. The first and second moments have information about the shape of the spectrum, which belongs to the frequency domain. The hit rates increase a few percent after the first and second moments are taken into feature vectors, comparing with the hit rates by using only the zero moment. It indicates that there is some information in the frequency domain, which is useful for the classification for the six types of motions. Different results are obtained for the classification of four grasp types. The hit rates decrease a few percent after the first and second moments are taken into feature vectors. It might introduce noises to add more moments into the feature vector. The results remind us that it is not necessary to use spectral approach in the classification for the following reason: the zero moment of spectrum is good enough. This feature essentially represents the energy, which can be calculated however as integral square of time series. This brings us back to temporal approach. The multiple windows methods are good for the extraction of energy information. Furthermore, the results indicate that the frequency information is more important in order to discriminate the large cylinder grasp motion and small cylinder grasp motion, and to discriminate the large ball grasp motion and small ball grasp motion. How the underlying muscle physiology mechanism works is beyond the scope of this work to understand. But it inspires us a classification scheme which use hierarchical classification.

111 The discrete prolate spheroidal sequences (DPSS) play an important role in both the multiple Slepian windows method and short time Thomson transform (STTT). Using DPSS is good technique for EMG signal processing.