Monitoring motor capacity changes of children during rehabilitation using body-worn sensors

Abstract

BackgroundRehabilitation services use outcome measures to track motor performance of their patients over time. State-of-the-art approaches use mainly patients’ feedback and experts’ observations for this purpose. We aim at continuously monitoring children in daily life and assessing normal activities to close the gap between movements done as instructed by caregivers and natural movements during daily life. To investigate the applicability of body-worn sensors for motor assessment in children, we investigated changes in movement capacity during defined motor tasks longitudinally.MethodsWe performed a longitudinal study over four weeks with 4 children (2 girls; 2 diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy and 2 with stroke, on average 10.5 years old) undergoing rehabilitation. Every week, the children performed 10 predefined motor tasks. Capacity in terms of quality and quantity was assessed by experts and movement was monitored using 10 ETH Orientation Sensors (ETHOS), a small and unobtrusive inertial measurement unit. Features such as smoothness of movement were calculated from the sensor data and a regression was used to estimate the capacity from the features and their relation to clinical data. Therefore, the target and features were normalized to range from 0 to 1.ResultsWe achieved a mean RMS-error of 0.15 and a mean correlation value of 0.86 (p<0.05 for all tasks) between our regression estimate of motor task capacity and experts’ ratings across all tasks. We identified the most important features and were able to reduce the sensor setup from 10 to 3 sensors. We investigated features that provided a good estimate of the motor capacity independently of the task performed, e.g. smoothness of the movement.ConclusionsWe found that children’s task capacity can be assessed from wearable sensors and that some of the calculated features provide a good estimate of movement capacity over different tasks. This indicates the potential of using the sensors in daily life, when little or no information on the task performed is available. For the assessment, the use of three sensors on both wrists and the hip suffices. With the developed algorithms, we plan to assess children’s motor performance in daily life with a follow-up study.

Toward Automating Clinical Assessments: A Survey of the Timed Up and Go

“…The next most common choice was the lower limbs, a choice which yields a high number of gait parameters. Five studies [41], [72], [75]-[77] investigated accelerometers or gyroscopes on the upper limbs and only one study [78] researched movements of the head.…”

Mobile Health Technologies for Continuous Monitoring of Cancer Patients in Palliative Care Aiming to Predict Health Status Deterioration: A Feasibility Study

“…Utilization of smartphones and sensor-equipped devices gives the possibility to obtain objective patient-related parameters in an unobtrusive, continuous, and real-time manner. Mobile health technology has been explored in numerous diseases and patient groups, for example, in cardiovascular diseases, 11 hemodialysis patients, 12 chronic pain, 13 children with cerebral palsy, 14 stroke rehabilitation, 15 Parkinson, 16 and stressed persons. 17 Use of mobile health devices for patient-reported outcomes (PROs) has recently been implemented in oncological care.…”

Peripheral device to quantify grip and pinch capacity of children

“…Other authors also developed a peripheral device associated with a game to acquire the data more easily, and they were able to verify the strength limit and ROM (Boschi and Frère, 2013). Strohrmann et al (2013) measured some ADLs with sensors attached to the body, but they did not quantify these data. Another study associated the use of instrumented gloves to a virtual environment to train movements of daily activity, but also did not quantify these data (Dimbwadyo-Terrer et al, 2016).…”