Event-Driven Implementation of a Physical Reservoir Computing Framework for Superficial EMG-Based Gesture Recognition

Wearable health devices have a strong demand in real-time biomedical signal processing. However, traditional methods often require data transmission to centralized processing unit with substantial computational resources after collecting it from edge devices. Neuromorphic computing is an emerging field that seeks to design specialized hardware for computing systems inspired by the structure, function, and dynamics of the human brain, offering significant advantages in latency and power consumption. This article explores a novel neuromorphic implementation approach for gesture recognition by extracting spatiotemporal spiking information from surface electromyography (sEMG) data in an event-driven manner. At the same time, the network was designed by implementing a simple-structured and hardware-friendly physical reservoir computing (PRC) framework called rotating neuron reservoir (RNR) within the domain of spiking neural network (SNN). The spiking RNR (sRNR) is promising to pipeline an innovative solution to compact embedded wearable systems, enabling low-latency, real-time processing directly at the sensor level. The proposed system was validated by an open-access large-scale sEMG database and achieved an average classification accuracy of 74.6% and 80.3% using a classical machine learning classifier and a delta learning rule algorithm, respectively. While the delta learning rule could be fully spiking and implementable on neuromorphic chips, the proposed gesture recognition system demonstrates the potential for near-sensor low-latency processing.