Abstract:  This paper develops data-driven deep model to estimate muscle contraction force from surface electromyography (EMG) signals. The proposed estimation model is based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Information of EMG signals from both time and frequency domains has been utilized as input data to two CNN branches. Raw EMG signals are directly input into one branch in order to extract time domain characteristics, while frequency information is fed into the other CNN branch. These two branches are summarized at a concatenation layer, which is followed by three full-connected layers to estimate force levels. End point force at hand, considering the dumbbell curl exercises, has been measured using a testing apparatus, which was designed with a single point load cell. The force data is used as training data of the deep CNN EMG-force model. For validation, different structures of the CNN model are examined with an estimation index of coefficient of determination using EMG and force data of nine subjects

Keywords: EMG force estimation, CNN-based model, raw EMG signals, frequency information.