Development of Machine-Learning Algorithms for Recognition of Subjects' Upper Limb Movement Intention Using Electroencephalogram Signals

• Published in: 2021 43rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC) Vol. 2021; pp. 190 - 193
• Main Authors: Al-Khuzaei, Fatima, Homoud, Leen Al, Alyafei, Dana, Tafreshi, Reza, Wahid, Md Ferdous
• Format: Conference Proceeding Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.11.2021
• Subjects: Algorithms; Bayes Theorem; Distance measurement; Electroencephalogram; Electroencephalography; hand gestures; Humans; Image segmentation; Independent component analysis; Intention; Machine Learning; majority voting; post-processing; Radio frequency; Support vector machines; Upper Extremity
• ISSN: 2694-0604
• DOI: 10.1109/EMBC46164.2021.9629781

This study aims to classify rest and upper limb movements execution and intention using electroencephalogram (EEG) signals by developing machine-learning (ML) algorithms. Five different MLs are implemented, including k-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Naïve Bayes (NB), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Random Forest (RF). The EEG data from fifteen healthy subjects during motor execution (ME) and motor imagination (MI) are preprocessed with Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to reduce eye-blinking associated artifacts. A sliding window technique varying from 1 s to 2 s is used to segment the signals. The majority voting (MV) strategy is employed during the post-processing stage. The results show that the application of ICA increases the accuracy of MI up to 6%, which is improved further by 1-2% using the MV (p<0.05). However, the improvement in the accuracies is more significant in MI (>5%) than in ME (<1%), indicating a more significant influence of eye-blinking artifacts in the EEG signals during MI than ME. Among the MLs, both RF and SVM consistently produced better accuracies in both ME and MI. Using RF, the 2 s window size produced the highest accuracies in both ME and MI than the smaller window sizes.