Leveraging Agonistic-Antagonistic Coactivation in Single-Grid HDsEMG for Hand Gesture Recognition

Firas Darwish, Dhiyaa Al Jorf, Costanza Armanini, Eion Tyacke, Farah E. Shamout

Surface Electromyography (sEMG) is critical for intention prediction in human-computer interfaces, such as for prosthetics control. Although deep learning models for Hand Gesture Recognition (HGR) yield excellent results, they impose high computational and hardware demands. This paper addresses this bottleneck by exploiting redundancies in agonist-antagonist muscle activity, hypothesizing that coactivations present in the sEMG signals from the extensor or flexor groups alone are sufficient for accurate HGR. We evaluate this by comparing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained on one muscle grid against CNN architectures trained jointly on both grids. Experiments were conducted using 16 gestures from a dataset of high-density sEMG signals from 20 subjects. The results demonstrate that the extensor grid alone achieves performance (89.5% balanced accuracy, 0.99 AUROC) comparable to the dual-grid system (94.6% balanced accuracy, 1.00 AUROC). Notably, even when applying slow joint fusion to capture spatial features across grids, model performance did not improve. GradCAM visualizations and anatomical analysis further indicate that the extensor region provides superior signal quality compared to the flexors. Our findings suggest that for a base set of DoF gestures, HGR hardware requirements and computational complexity can be halved without a prohibitive loss in accuracy.