  Recent human computer-interaction (HCI) studies using electromyography (EMG)
and inertial measurement units (IMUs) for upper-limb gesture recognition have
claimed that inertial measurements alone result in higher classification
accuracy than EMG. In biomedical research such as in prosthesis control,
however, EMG remains the gold standard for providing gesture specific
information, exceeding the performance of IMUs alone. This study, therefore,
presents a preliminary investigation of these conflicting claims between these
converging research fields. Previous claims from both fields were verified
within this study using publicly available datasets. The conflicting claims
were found to stem from differences in terminology and experimental design.
Specifically, HCI studies were found to exploit positional variation to
increase separation between similar hand gestures. Conversely, in clinical
applications such as prosthetics, position invariant gestures are
preferred.This work therefore suggests that future studies explicitly outline
experimental approaches to better differentiate between gesture recognition
approaches.
