A Novel Multi-Stream Informer Used for Lower Extremity Joint Angle Estimation

Abstract

In lower extremity exoskeleton rehabilitation systems, synergy and proportionality between the human lower extremity and the exoskeleton robot have been a critical goal to pursue. In recent years, changeable deep learning models based on multi-source signals have been used for lower limb continuous motion estimation. During the process, multimode signals are fed into the time processing model as time series. However, there are some deficiencies in this framework, on the one hand, what kind of multi-source combination can be more efficient; on the other hand, most of the existing models need several iterations or network stacking to complete the extraction of temporal information. This study set out to address the above problems, we put forward Multi-Stream Informer (MS-Informer), using Multi-Stream combination and sparse attention mechanisms for lower limb continuous motion estimation. In the experiment, we compare MS-Informer and Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) and Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) under distinctive multi-source combinations. In summary, MS-informer performs well in multiple evaluations compared with other models. Experimental results illustrate that the MS-Informer is more efficacious in lower limb joint angle estimation and is a promising method for achieving coordinated control of lower limb exoskeletons.