Heterogeneous Population Encoding for Multi-joint Regression using sEMG Signals

Regression-based decoding of continuous movements is essential for human-machine interfaces (HMIs), such as prosthetic control. This study explores a feature-based approach to encoding surface Electromyography (sEMG) signals, focusing on the role of variability in neural-inspired population encoding. By employing heterogeneous populations of Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) neurons with varying sizes and diverse parameter distributions, we investigate how population size and variability in encoding parameters, such as membrane time constants and thresholds, influence decoding performance. Using a simple linear readout, we demonstrate that variability improves generalizability compared to single-neuron encoding scheme. These findings emphasize the importance of exploiting and optimizing variability and population size for efficient and scalable regression tasks in spiking neural networks (SNNs), paving the way for robust, low-power HMI implementations.