Automation of motor dexterity assessment

IEEE Int Conf Rehabil Robot. 2017 Jul:2017:521-526. doi: 10.1109/ICORR.2017.8009301.

Abstract

Motor dexterity assessment is regularly performed in rehabilitation wards to establish patient status and automatization for such routinary task is sought. A system for automatizing the assessment of motor dexterity based on the Fugl-Meyer scale and with loose restrictions on sensing technologies is presented. The system consists of two main elements: 1) A data representation that abstracts the low level information obtained from a variety of sensors, into a highly separable low dimensionality encoding employing t-distributed Stochastic Neighbourhood Embedding, and, 2) central to this communication, a multi-label classifier that boosts classification rates by exploiting the fact that the classes corresponding to the individual exercises are naturally organized as a network. Depending on the targeted therapeutic movement class labels i.e. exercises scores, are highly correlated-patients who perform well in one, tends to perform well in related exercises-; and critically no node can be used as proxy of others - an exercise does not encode the information of other exercises. Over data from a cohort of 20 patients, the novel classifier outperforms classical Naive Bayes, random forest and variants of support vector machines (ANOVA: p < 0.001). The novel multi-label classification strategy fulfills an automatic system for motor dexterity assessment, with implications for lessening therapist's workloads, reducing healthcare costs and providing support for home-based virtual rehabilitation and telerehabilitation alternatives.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Exercise Therapy*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Motor Skills / physiology*
  • Neurological Rehabilitation
  • Patient Outcome Assessment*
  • Support Vector Machine*
  • Treatment Outcome