Prosthetic Hand Manipulation System Based on EMG and Eye Tracking Powered by the Neuromorphic Processor AltAi

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Authors: Roman Akinshin, Elizaveta Lopatina, Kirill Bogatikov, Nikolai Kiz, Anna V. Makarova, Mikhail Dmitrievich Lebedev, Miguel Altamirano Cabrera, Dzmitry Tsetserukou, Valerii Kangler
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Abstract

This paper presents a novel neuromorphic control architecture for upper-limb prostheses that combines surface electromyography (sEMG) with gaze-guided computer vision. The system uses a spiking neural network deployed on the neuromorphic processor AltAi to classify EMG patterns in real time while an eye-tracking headset and scene camera identify the object within the user's focus. In our prototype, the same EMG recognition model that was originally developed for a conventional GPU is deployed as a spiking network on AltAi, achieving comparable accuracy while operating in a sub-watt power regime, which enables a lightweight, wearable implementation. For six distinct functional gestures recorded from upper-limb amputees, the system achieves robust recognition performance comparable to state-of-the-art myoelectric interfaces. When the vision pipeline restricts the decision space to three context-appropriate gestures for the currently viewed object, recognition accuracy increases to roughly 95% while excluding unsafe, object-inappropriate grasps. These results indicate that the proposed neuromorphic, context-aware controller can provide energy-efficient and reliable prosthesis control and has the potential to improve safety and usability in everyday activities for people with upper-limb amputation.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Muscle activation and electromyography studies Prosthetics and Rehabilitation Robotics Neuroscience and Neural Engineering

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
25 January 2026
Document type
Preprint