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>...whether he has a hand is irrelevant

This is probably a reach. At a bare minimum, decoding EMG won't work if you never had a hand. If you had an amputation, the means by which your hand was removed will greatly impact the efficacy of this sytem.

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if the nerve endings between brain and shoulder are there, it could still work. The device would need to give consistent feedback for the brain to be trained. it's similar to a stroke victim learning to walk again.

Could you explain in more detail what the effects of different methods would be?

amputations too high up, or accidental amputations that mangle rather than cleanly remove, are more likely to make EMG decoding harder. If the axons are too damaged during the amputation they'll wither and die, so the signal's lost; if the arm is removed too high up, it becomes more challenging to isolate existing neurons that went all the way to the fingers.

In both cases, muscle movement itself will swamp the motor neuron signal in ways that make demuxing very challenging.

>neurons that went all the way to the fingers.

nitpick: there are no such motor neurons. The fingers are controlled by muscles in the palm and forearm. But you probably knew this :)

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