A Novel TCN-LSTM Hybrid Model for sEMG-Based Continuous Estimation of Wrist Joint Angles

Surface electromyography (sEMG) offers a novel method in human-machine interactions (HMIs) since it is a distinct physiological electrical signal that conceals human movement intention and muscle information. Unfortunately, the nonlinear and non-smooth features of sEMG signals often make joint angle estimation difficult. This paper proposes a joint angle prediction model for the continuous estimation of wrist motion angle changes based on sEMG signals. The proposed model combines a temporal convolutional network (TCN) with a long short-term memory (LSTM) network, where the TCN can sense local information and mine the deeper information of the sEMG signals, while LSTM, with its excellent temporal memory capability, can make up for the lack of the ability of the TCN to capture the long-term dependence of the sEMG signals, resulting in a better prediction. We validated the proposed method in the publicly available Ninapro DB1 dataset by selecting the first eight subjects and picking three types of wrist-dependent movements: wrist flexion (WF), wrist ulnar deviation (WUD), and wrist extension and closed hand (WECH). Finally, the proposed TCN-LSTM model was compared with the TCN and LSTM models. The proposed TCN-LSTM outperformed the TCN and LSTM models in terms of the root mean square error (<i>RMSE</i>) and average coefficient of determination (<i>R</i>²). The TCN-LSTM model achieved an average <i>RMSE</i> of 0.064, representing a 41% reduction compared to the TCN model and a 52% reduction compared to the LSTM model. The TCN-LSTM also achieved an average <i>R</i>² of 0.93, indicating an 11% improvement over the TCN model and an 18% improvement over the LSTM model.