A Fast Calibration Method for an sEMG-Based Lower Limb Joint Torque Estimation Model

Abstract

The joint torque estimation model based on surface electromyography (sEMG) signals needs to recalibrate the model parameters when used for joint torque estimation at different volunteers. However, the feature transferability drops significantly in higher task-specific layers, which reduce the performance of the model. The generalization of joint torque estimation models among different volunteers has become a challenge. In this paper, a fast calibration method based on a deep adaptive regression network is proposed to reduce the frequency and time of model recalibration when volunteers change. The proposed method associates source domain (SD) data with target domain (TD) data through migration learning. The maximum mean difference (MMD) adaptive method is used to migrate the model trained in the SD dataset to the TD dataset, which avoids the recalibration required in the joint torque estimation model. The experimental results show that the proposed method can improve the migration ability of the model used for estimating joint torque and achieve the generalization application of the model on different volunteer datasets. Moreover, the proposed method can reduce the calibration operations and iterations of the model caused by volunteer changes and improve the speed of joint torque estimation. The optimal normalized root mean square error (NRMSE) and Pearson correlation coefficient (ρ) of knee extension/flexion joint torque estimation reached 0.02198/0.02565 and 0.9892/0.9839, respectively.