Accelerometry-Based Activity Recognition and Assessment in Rheumatic and Musculoskeletal Diseases

Abstract

One of the important aspects to be considered in rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases is the patient’s activity capacity (or performance), defined as the ability to perform a task. Currently, it is assessed by physicians or health professionals mainly by means of a patient-reported questionnaire, sometimes combined with the therapist’s judgment on performance-based tasks. This work introduces an approach to assess the activity capacity at home in a more objective, yet interpretable way. It offers a pilot study on 28 patients suffering from axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA) to demonstrate its efficacy. Firstly, a protocol is introduced to recognize a limited set of six transition activities in the home environment using a single accelerometer. To this end, a hierarchical classifier with the rejection of non-informative activity segments has been developed drawing on both direct pattern recognition and statistical signal features. Secondly, the recognized activities should be assessed, similarly to the scoring performed by patients themselves. This is achieved through the interval coded scoring (ICS) system, a novel method to extract an interpretable scoring system from data. The activity recognition reaches an average accuracy of 93.5%; assessment is currently 64.3% accurate. These results indicate the potential of the approach; a next step should be its validation in a larger patient study.

Recognition of Physical Activities from a Single Arm-Worn Accelerometer: A Multiway Approach

“…Nevertheless, patterns also contain inherent noise in the sense that parts of the movement are not defining aspects of a particular activity. Current results are promising for many subjects, but an earlier study on the Sensewear dataset showed that much is to be gained by combining pattern features with more general statistical features [47]. In the future, it could be beneficial to merge the feature set obtained by HODA with the statistical features employed there.…”

“…The dynamic regions of the signal are subsequently separated from the more static ones. This separation was implemented as a step-wise adaptive approach [47].…”

Application of Evaluation Parameters for Successful Transmission in wireless sensor networks

“…The vest provides a portable and low-cost solution that can be used indoors and outdoors to provide long-term care at home. The recognition abilities of accelerometerbased detection and activity monitoring can help in assessing rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases [7]. There are several other examples of similar research and development studies that are shifting the paradigm of patient care and welfare.…”

Novel Adaptive Transmission Protocol for Mobile Sensors that Improves Energy Efficiency and Removes the Limitation of State Based Adaptive Power Control Protocol (SAPC)

“…The vest provides a portable and low-cost solution that can be used indoors and outdoors to provide long-term care at home. The recognition abilities of accelerometer-based detection and activity monitoring can help in assessing rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases [7]. There are several other examples of similar research and development studies that are shifting the paradigm of patient care and welfare.…”