A Hierarchical Fusion Strategy Based on EEG and sEMG for Human-Exoskeleton System

Most of the human spinal cord injuries result in lower-limb disability. To integrate the brain’s holistic motion intention with sEMG’s control reliability for lower-limb motion neurorehabilitation with the exoskeleton, an ingenious hierarchical fusion strategy based on EEG and sEMG for ambulation with obstacle crossing task was proposed. Specifically, EEG delivers senior task-specific commands to execute refined locomotion while the specific implementation is determined by sEMG. The practical feasibility of ridge regression-based EEG decoding was proved firstly via offline and online methods involving 3 subjects, with subsequent online verification of the proposed strategy yielding higher than 85% of average accuracy. Furthermore, one subject was invited to wear the exoskeleton for the practical application of the strategy.