Study on Lower Limb Motion Intention Recognition Based on PO-SVMD-ResNet-GRU

This study aims to enhance the accuracy of human lower limb motion intention recognition based on surface electromyography (sEMG) signals and proposes a signal denoising method based on Sequential Variational Mode Decomposition (SVMD) optimized by the Parrot Optimization (PO) algorithm and a joint motion angle prediction model combining Residual Network (ResNet) with Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) for the two aspects of signal processing and predictive modeling, respectively. First, for the two motion conditions of level walking and stair climbing, sEMG signals from the rectus femoris, vastus lateralis, semitendinosus, and biceps femoris, as well as the motion angles of the hip and knee joints, were simultaneously collected from five healthy subjects, yielding a total of 400 gait cycle data points. The sEMG signals were denoised using the method combining PO-SVMD with wavelet thresholding. Compared with denoising methods such as Empirical Mode Decomposition, Partial Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition, Independent Component Analysis, and wavelet thresholding alone, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the proposed method was increased to a maximum of 23.42 dB. Then, the gait cycle information was divided into training and testing sets at a 4:1 ratio, and five models—ResNet-GRU, Transformer-LSTM, CNN-GRU, ResNet, and GRU—were trained and tested individually using the processed sEMG signals as input and the hip and knee joint movement angles as output. Finally, the root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and coefficient of determination (R²) were used as evaluation metrics for the test results. The results show that for both motion conditions, the evaluation metrics of the ResNet-GRU model in the test results are superior to those of the other four models. The optimal evaluation metrics for level walking are 2.512 ± 0.415°, 1.863 ± 0.265°, and 0.979 ± 0.007, respectively, while the optimal evaluation metrics for stair climbing are 2.475 ± 0.442°, 2.012 ± 0.336°, and 0.98 ± 0.009, respectively. The method proposed in this study achieves improvements in both signal processing and predictive modeling, providing a new method for research on lower limb motion intention recognition.