Pottery gesture analysis with Myo
In this paper we propose a set of Electromyogram (EMG)
based features such as muscles total pressure, flexors
pressure, tensors pressure, and gesture stiffness, for the
purpose of identifying differences in performing the same
gesture across three pottery constructions namely bowl,
cylindrical vase, and spherical vase. In identifying these
EMG-based features we have developed a tool for visualizing
in real-time the signals generated from a Myo
sensor along with the muscle activation level in 3D space.
In order to do this, we have introduced an algorithm for
estimating the activation level of each muscle based on
the weighted sum of the 8 EMG signals captured by Myo.
In particular, the weights are calculated as the distance
of the muscle cross-sectional volumes at Myo plane level
from each of the 8 Myo pods, multiplied by the muscle
cross-section volume. Statistics estimated on an experimental
dataset for the proposed features such as mean,
variance, and percentiles, indicate that gestures such as
“Raise clay” and “Form down cyclic clay” exhibit differences
across the three vase types (i.e. bowl, cylinder,
and sphere), although perceived as identical. More details can be found in conference publication [20]. A visualization of the methodology is shown below.