Online Unsupervised Adaptation of Latent Representation for Myoelectric Control during User-Decoder Co-Adaptation

Myoelectric control interfaces, which map electromyographic (EMG) signals into control commands for external devices, have applications in active prosthesis control. However, the statistical characteristics of EMG signals change over time (e.g., because of changes in the electrode location), which makes interfaces based on static mapping unstable. Thus the user-decoder co-adaptation is needed during online operations. Nevertheless, current online decoder adaptation approaches present several practical challenges, such as expensive data labeling and slow convergence. Thus we introduce an unsupervised decoder adaptation method that converges rapidly. We use an autoencoder to extract motor intent representation in the latent manifold space rather than the sensor space, and further introduce an online unsupervised adaptation scheme based on Moore-Penrose Inverse, a noniterative approach suited for fast network re-training, to track the evolving manifold. A validation experiment first showed that the convergence time of the proposed adaptation scheme was reduced to about 50% of that for state-of-the-art methods. Online experiments further evaluated cursor and prosthetic hand control by the proposed myocontrol interface, where perturbations were representatively introduced by shifting the electrodes. Results showed that our scheme reached comparable improvements in robustness as supervised counterparts. Moreover, in a cup relocation test with a prosthetic hand, the completion time in the post-adaptation phase with electrode shift was comparable to that in the baseline phase without shift. These results suggest that our method effectively improves the accessibility and reliability of decoder adaptation, which has the potential to reduce the translational gap of myoelectric control interfaces by effective co-adaptation during operation.