sEMG-Based Gesture-Free Hand Intention Recognition: System, Dataset, Toolbox, and Benchmark Results

In sensitive scenarios, such as meetings, negotiations, and team sports, messages must be conveyed without detection by noncollaborators. Previous methods, such as encrypting messages, eye contact, and micro-gestures, had problems with either inaccurate information transmission or leakage of interaction intentions. To this end, a novel gesture-free hand intention recognition scheme was proposed, that adopted surface electromyography (sEMG) and isometric contraction theory to recognize hand intentions without any gesture. Specifically, this work includes four aspects: first, the experimental system, consisting of the self-conducted myoelectric wristband, the matched host computer software, and the sports platform, is built to get sEMG signals and simulate multiple usage scenarios; second, the paradigm is designed to standard prompt and collect the gesture-free sEMG datasets. Eight-channel signals of ten subjects were recorded twice per subject at about 5–10 days intervals; third, the toolbox integrates preprocessing methods (data segmentation, filter, normalization, etc.), widely used sEMG classification methods, and various plotting functions, to facilitate future research based this dataset; fourth, the benchmark results of widely used methods are provided. The results involve single-day, cross-day, and cross-subject experiments of six-class and 12-class gesture-free hand intention when subjects have different time windows.