
Certificate of Completion
THIS ACKNOWLEDGES THAT
HAS COMPLETED THE FALL 2025 DATA SCIENCE BOOT CAMP
Carrie Clark
Roman Holowinsky, PhD
NOVEMBER 13, 2025
DIRECTOR
DATE

TEAM
Personalized Gesture Recognition
Sero Parel, Carrie Clark, Brian Mullen, Philip Nelson, Revati Jadhav

Smart wristbands enable users to control technology through subtle hand gestures by decoding muscle signals. However, each individual's muscle signals are unique, making personalization a critical challenge. Leveraging a publicly available dataset (Kaifosh et al. 2025), our team developed a personalized gesture recognition model using surface electromyography (sEMG) data from 100 participants performing 9 gestures. Addressing inter-user variability through within-user training, we engineered 160 features and selected 37 via random forest ranking and correlation pruning. Logistic regression with L2 regularization achieved strong cross-validation performance (F1 Macro = 0.7164), but holdout testing revealed a generalization gap (F1 Macro = 0.3977). Performance varied widely, confirming heterogeneity in performance across diverse users. Future work could explore adaptive time windows and fine-tuning pre-trained models to enable more robust commercial neuromotor interfaces.
