Upper Limb Motor Sequence Analysis: From Isolated to Sequential

Motor skills are performed through sequential movements rather than isolated actions. Yet, decoding these sequences from biosignals poses a significant challenge. To address this gap, this study transitions motor decoding from classifying movements in isolated time windows to segmenting sequential movements. The proposed algorithm segments the electromyography (EMG) sequence in a coarse-to-fine manner. It begins with frame-level segmentation and locating the approximate boundaries at the movement-level. A region-growing-inspired fusion strategy is then designed to incorporate the coarse segmentation and localization results for the fined output. Experiments on a self-collected EMG dataset demonstrate impressive results in segmenting movements for participant-dependent/independent setups (accuracy: $94.2{\%}/74.7{\%}$; dice coefficient: $92.5{\%}/61.7{\%}$; mean Intersection over Union: $80.9{\%}/51.9{\%}$). Further analysis shows the algorithm's ability to capture the natural rhythm in participants' movement sequences. This research paves the way for a deep understanding of motor sequences, which benefits various applications, such as rehabilitation engineering.