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arXiv · 2507.19736

LowKeyEMG: Electromyographic typing with a reduced keyset

Abstract

We introduce LowKeyEMG, a real-time human-computer interface that enables efficient text entry using only 7 gesture classes decoded from surface electromyography (sEMG). Prior work has attempted full-alphabet decoding from sEMG, but decoding large character sets remains unreliable, especially for individuals with motor impairments. Instead, LowKeyEMG reduces the English alphabet to 4 gesture keys, with 3 more for space and system interaction, to reliably translate simple one-handed gestures into text, leveraging the recurrent transformer-based language model RWKV for efficient computation. In real-time experiments, participants achieved average one-handed keyboardless typing speeds of 23.3 words per minute with LowKeyEMG, and improved gesture efficiency by 17% (relative to typed phrase length). When typing with only 7 keys, LowKeyEMG can achieve 98.2% top-3 word accuracy, demonstrating that this low-key typing paradigm can maintain practical communication rates. Our results have implications for assistive technologies and any interface where input bandwidth is constrained.

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Johannes Y. Lee, Derek Xiao, Shreyas Kaasyap, Nima R. Hadidi, John L. Zhou, Jacob Cunningham, Rakshith R. Gore, Deniz O. Eren, Jonathan C. Kao. 2025-07-26. LowKeyEMG: Electromyographic typing with a reduced keyset. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19736

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