A Muscle Fiber-Based Soft Hand Exoskeleton Control Strategy for Fine Manipulation: A Preliminary Investigation

Abstract

While soft hand exoskeleton robots have approached human-level dexterity in terms of degrees of freedom, precise control methods for fine motor movements remain a significant challenge. Surface electromyography (sEMG) is widely employed in gesture recognition to enable patients to independently control a soft hand exoskeleton. However, individual finger control remains challenging through sEMG-based control due to the complexity of decoupling synergistic muscle activities. In this study, we propose a muscle fiber-based ultrasound perception strategy for fine hand motion recognition and soft hand exoskeleton control. Ultrasound imaging enables non-invasive visualization of forearm muscle morphology and provides information associated with underlying muscle-fiber activity. By reconstructing muscle morphology from ultrasound images, biologically relevant muscle-fiber features are extracted and fused to characterize fine hand movements. A lightweight Random Forest classifier is subsequently employed to map these biologically informed features to discrete hand actions, providing a computationally efficient recognition module for real-time control. To the best of our knowledge, publicly available ultrasound image datasets specifically designed for fine hand gesture recognition in rehabilitation applications remain limited. In the experiments, a dataset containing 21 hand gestures based on muscle ultrasound images was constructed to evaluate the proposed method. All data were collected from healthy participants as a preliminary proof-of-concept investigation. The results show that the proposed approach achieves an average recognition accuracy of 95.24% across three subjects in finger motion recognition. This preliminary study demonstrates the potential of machine learning-based ultrasound perception for improving fine hand gesture recognition and providing an intuitive control interface for soft hand exoskeletons, thereby enhancing their applicability in hand rehabilitation scenarios.