sEMG (surface electromyography) signal control of bionic prostheses has been widely studied over the past few years. In particular, sparse sEMG signals are rapidly developing in the field of gesture recognition for their convenience, noninvasiveness, and ease of access. However, compared with high-density EMG signals, sparse EMG signals lack rich feature information, which in turn affects gesture recognition accuracy. In order to reduce the loss of feature information of sparse EMG signals in the spatio-temporal dimension, this paper proposes a hybrid neural network Res-LSTM combining residual network and long short-term memory network. The ordinary convolutional blocks in the CNN network are replaced with residual blocks, and the final fully connected layer is removed and a constant mapping layer is added to adequate extraction of spatial feature information of the data. The Res layer’s output is utilized as the input for the long and short-term memory (LSTM) network, which further extracts the features of the data in the temporal dimension, and finally completes the categorization output through a fully connected layer. The average accuracy of 91.11% for gesture-motion classification was verified by training on a homebrew dataset; and tested on a public dataset, NinaPro DB1, with an average accuracy of 91.03%. The experimental findings indicate that the proposed Res-LSTM network framework contributes to solving the problem of lack of feature information of sparse sEMG signals and improves the pattern recognition accuracy.