Continuous Prediction of Lower-Limb Kinematics from Multi-Modal Biomedical Signals

The fast-growing techniques of measuring and fusing multi-modal biomedical signals enable advanced motor intent decoding schemes of lower-limb exoskeletons, meeting the increasing demand for rehabilitative or assistive applications of take-home healthcare. Challenges of exoskeletons' motor intent decoding schemes remain in making a continuous prediction to compensate for the hysteretic response caused by mechanical transmission. In this paper, we solve this problem by proposing an ahead-of-time continuous prediction of lower-limb kinematics, with the prediction of knee angles during level walking as a case study. Firstly, an end-to-end kinematics prediction network(KinPreNet),1 consisting of a feature extractor and an angle predictor, is proposed and experimentally compared with features and methods traditionally used in ahead-of-time prediction of gait phases. Secondly, inspired by the electromechanical delay(EMD), we further explore our algorithm's capability of compensating response delay of mechanical transmission by validating the performance of the different sections of prediction time. And we experimentally reveal the time boundary of compensating the hysteretic response. Thirdly, a comparison of employing EMG signals or not is performed to reveal the EMG and kinematic signals' collaborated contributions to the continuous prediction. During the experiments, EMG signals of nine muscles and knee angles calculated from inertial measurement unit (IMU) signals are recorded from ten healthy subjects. Our algorithm can predict knee angles with the averaged RMSE of 3.98 deg which is better than the 15.95-deg averaged RMSE of utilizing the traditional methods of ahead-of-time prediction. The best prediction time is in the interval of 27ms and 108ms. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of continuously predicting lower-limb kinematics in an ahead-of-time manner based on the electromechanical delay (EMD).