SplashNet: Split‑and‑Share Encoders for Accurate and Efficient Typing with Surface Electromyography

Nima Ryan Hadidi, Jason Chan, Ebrahim Feghhi, Jonathan Kao

sEMG EMG electromyography typing keystroke keyboard qwerty emg2qwerty BCI HCI neuromotor

Abstract

Surface electromyography (sEMG) at the wrists could enable natural, keyboard-free text entry, yet the state-of-the-art emg2qwerty baseline still misrecognizes 51.8% of characters zero-shot on unseen users and 7.0% after user-specific fine-tuning. We trace much of these errors to mismatched cross-user signal statistics, fragile reliance on high-order feature dependencies, and the absence of architectural inductive biases aligned with the bilateral nature of typing.

To address these issues, we introduce three simple modifications:

Rolling Time Normalization which adaptively aligns input distributions across users;
Aggressive Channel Masking, which encourages reliance on low-order feature combinations more likely to generalize across users; and
a Split-and-Share encoder that processes each hand independently with weight-shared streams to reflect the bilateral symmetry of the neuromuscular system.

Combined with a five-fold reduction in spectral resolution (33

\to

6 frequency bands), these components yield a compact Split-and-Share model, SplashNet-mini, which uses only ¼ the parameters and 0.6× the FLOPs of the baseline while reducing character error rate (CER) to 36.4% zero-shot and 5.9% after fine-tuning. An upscaled variant, SplashNet (½ parameters, 1.15× FLOPs of the baseline), further lowers error to 35.7% and 5.5%, representing 31% and 21% relative improvements in the zero-shot and finetuned settings, respectively. SplashNet therefore establishes a new state-of-the-art without requiring additional data.