The simultaneous control of multiple degrees of freedom (DOFs) is important for the intuitive, life-like control of artificial limbs. The objective of this study was to determine whether the use of intramuscular electromyogram (EMG) improved pattern classification of simultaneous wrist/hand movements compared to surface EMG. Two pattern classification methods were used in this analysis, and were trained to predict 1-DOF and 2-DOF movements involving wrist rotation, wrist flexion/extension, and hand open/close. The classification methods used were (1) a single pattern classifier discriminating between 1-DOF and 2-DOF motion classes, and (2) a parallel set of three classifiers to predict the activity of each of the 3 DOFs. We demonstrate that in this combined wrist/hand classification task, the use of intramuscular EMG significantly decreases classification error compared to surface EMG for the parallel configuration (p<0.01), but not for the single classifier. We also show that the use of intramuscular EMG mitigates the increase in errors produced when the parallel classifier method is trained without 2-DOF motion class data.
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