Classification of Hand Movements from EMG Signals for People with Motor Disabilities

People with disabilities correspond to about 25% of the Brazilian population. A great part of these people have physical impairments that difficult the use computer peripherals. This article presents the development of a system for detection of hand movements through the acquisition and classification of electromyographic (EMG) signals using machine learning techniques. The purpose of the proposed system is to be used by people with disabilities to control an adapted text editor. The signals are capture by surface EMG electrodes and used to the detect 4 different hand movements. In addition, a database with 3200 EMG signals generated by the hand movements was created, made by one user diagnosed with cerebral palsy and another user without diagnosed motor disabilities. Several tests were carried out, showing the good accuracy of the proposed system, with a success classification rate of 96% to 98%.