The need for new, accessible hardware

Thalmic Labs Myo

The Myo had 10,000 orders in the first few hours of its launch and was listed among Time Magazine’s top inventions of the year. It changed the game for prosthetics research, despite being designed as an alternative to a mouse and keyboard and not a medical device [1]. Despite being discontinued in 2018, the Myo is mentioned in more than 1,700 articles on Google Scholar [2] and has many open source projects built using it.

Many Myo libraries use different preprocessing steps and EMG modes, the articles mentioned almost never publish their source code making it extremely hard to reproduce their results. Releasing the source code allows open code review and if mistakes are included, they can be found and fixed. Mistakes in code produced by academic papers are likely to occur. For example, a 2019 paper demonstrated that a script for chemical analysis used in over 100 academic papers gave inconsistent results due to differences in the default file-sorting algorithms in Python across different operating systems [3]. Authors who cited use of this script can be notified and their results fixed.

Sources:

[1] - S. Lake, “Ending sales of myo, preparing for the future,” Medium, Oct. 12, 2018. https://medium.com/@srlake/ending-sales-of-myo-preparing-for-the-future-281af9bbcac2 (accessed Apr. 17, 2021).

[2] - A. Jaramillo-Yánez, M. E. Benalcázar, and E. Mena-Maldonado, “Real-Time Hand Gesture Recognition Using Surface Electromyography and Machine Learning: A Systematic Literature Review,” Sensors , vol. 20, no. 9, Apr. 2020, doi: 10.3390/s20092467.

[3] - J. B. Neupane, R. P. Neupane, Y. Luo, W. Y. Yoshida, R. Sun, and P. G. Williams, “Characterization of Leptazolines A–D, Polar Oxazolines from the Cyanobacterium Leptolyngbya sp., Reveals a Glitch with the ‘Willoughby–Hoye’ Scripts for Calculating NMR Chemical Shifts,” Organic Letters, vol. 21, no. 20. pp. 8449–8453, 2019, doi: 10.1021/acs.orglett.9b03216.