Spatial Adaptation Layer: Interpretable Domain Adaptation For Biosignal Sensor Array Applications

Abstract: Machine learning offers promising methods for processing signals recorded with wearable devices such as surface electromyography (sEMG) and electroencephalography (EEG). However, in these applications, despite high within-session performance, intersession performance is hindered by electrode shift, a known issue across modalities. Existing solutions often require large and expensive datasets and/or lack robustness and interpretability. Thus, we propose the Spatial Adaptation Layer (SAL), which can be applied to any biosignal array model and learns a parametrized affine transformation at the input between two recording sessions. We also introduce learnable baseline normalization (LBN) to reduce baseline fluctuations. Tested on two HD-sEMG gesture recognition datasets, SAL and LBN outperformed standard fine-tuning on regular arrays, achieving competitive performance even with a logistic regressor, with orders of magnitude less, physically interpretable parameters. Our ablation study showed that forearm circumferential translations account for the majority of performance improvements.