Measurement of sEMG and hand motion identification for hand rehabilitation equipment development

In recent years, the population of disabled people has been increasing tendency in Japan. Among them, physical disability due to hemiplegia is the most common. For hemiplegic patients to live independent living, grasp and pinch motions are necessary. To realize this movement, it is necessary to move the first finger and the fifth finger separately. The purpose of my research was to development of hand rehabilitation equipment which for enables hemiplegic patients independent movements of first finger and fifth finger at the home. In this paper, first we propose rehabilitation equipment. Then, we investigate whether we can use the feature values of sEMG obtained from the forearm as a control signal for the proposed rehabilitation equipment. As a result, we considered that the discrimination result of each motion were insufficient in the evaluation using the threshold. Furthermore, the discrimination rate of flexion motion and extension motion by SVM was 64%. In the future, we will make measurements at several places for improve accuracy. Based on it, we consider effective electrodes position.