A classification and calibration procedure for gesture specific home-based therapy exercise in young people with cerebral palsy

Alexander Macintosh (1, 2) , Nicolas Vignais (3) , Eric Desailly (4, 5) , Elaine A. Biddiss (6) , Vincent Vigneron (7)

1 Department of Biomedical Engineering
2 University of Toronto
3 CIAMS - Complexité, Innovation, Activités Motrices et Sportives
4 Recherche and Innovation Department
5 Fondation Ellen Poidatz
6 Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital - Bloorview Research Institute [Toronto, ON, Canada]
7 IBISC - Informatique, BioInformatique, Systèmes Complexes

CCBYNCNDMovement-based video games can provide engaging practice for repetitive therapeutic gestures towards improving manual ability in youth with cerebral palsy (CP). However, home-based gesture calibration and classification is needed to personalize therapy and ensure an optimal challenge point. Nineteen youth with CP controlled a video game during a 4-week home-based intervention using therapeutic hand gestures detected via electromyography and inertial sensors. The in-game calibration and classification procedure selects the most discriminating, person-specific features using random forest classification. Then, a support vector machine is trained with this feature subset for in-game interaction. The procedure uses features intended to be sensitive to signs of CP and leverages directional statistics to characterize muscle activity around the forearm. Home-based calibration showed good agreement with video verified ground truths (0.86±0.11, 95%CI=0.93-0.97). Across participants, classifier performance (F1-score) for the primary therapeutic gesture was 0.90±0.05 (95%CI=0.87-0.92) and, for the secondary gesture, 0.82±0.09 (95%CI=0.77-0.86). Features sensitive to signs of CP were significant contributors to classification and correlated to wrist extension improvement and increased practice time. This study contributes insights for classifying gestures in people with CP and demonstrates a new gesture controller to facilitate home-based therapy gaming.

Keywords: Calibration; Cerebral palsy; Electromyography; Exercise therapy; Game; Games; Gestures; Machine learning; Medical treatment; Muscles; Support vector machines; Testing; Young adult; humans; adolescent; young adult; calibration; machine learning; game; calibration procedure; muscles; classification procedure; movement-based; medical treatment; exercise therapy; muscle activities; inertial sensor; random forest classification; hand; gestures; support vector machines; electromyography; games; cerebral palsy; testing; classifier performance; directional statistics; wrist joint

Domains: Engineering Sciences [physics]; Life Sciences [q-bio]; Cognitive science

Alexander Macintosh, Nicolas Vignais, Eric Desailly, Elaine A. Biddiss, Vincent Vigneron. A classification and calibration procedure for gesture specific home-based therapy exercise in young people with cerebral palsy. IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, 2021, 29, pp.144--155. ⟨10.1109/TNSRE.2020.3038370⟩. ⟨hal-03059940⟩