In-lab versus at-home activity recognition in ambulatory subjects with incomplete spinal cord injury.
Although commercially available activity trackers can aid in tracking therapy and recovery of patients, most devices perform poorly for patients with irregular movement patterns. Standard machine learning techniques can be applied on recorded accelerometer signals in order to classify the activities of ambulatory subjects with incomplete spinal cord injury in a way that is specific to this population and the location of the recording-at home or in the clinic.



Subjects were instructed to perform a standardized set of movements while wearing a waist-worn accelerometer in the clinic and at-home. Activities included lying, sitting, standing, walking, wheeling, and stair climbing. Multiple classifiers and validation methods were used to quantify the ability of the machine learning techniques to distinguish the activities recorded in-lab or at-home.



In the lab, classifiers trained and tested using within-subject cross-validation provided an accuracy of 91.6%. When the classifier was trained on data collected in the lab but tested on at home data, the accuracy fell to 54.6% indicating distinct movement patterns between locations. However, the accuracy of the at-home classifications, when training the classifier with at-home data, improved to 85.9%.



Individuals with unique movement patterns can benefit from using tailored activity recognition algorithms easily implemented using modern machine learning methods on collected movement data.
Max Nader Lab for Rehabilitation Technologies and Outcomes Research, Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA. mva@cs.luc.edu.|Department of Computer Science, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, USA. mva@cs.luc.edu.|Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA. mva@cs.luc.edu.
Mark V
MV
Albert
Max Nader Lab for Rehabilitation Technologies and Outcomes Research, Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA.|Department of Biomedical Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, USA.
Yohannes
Y
Azeze
Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA.
Michael
M
Courtois
Max Nader Lab for Rehabilitation Technologies and Outcomes Research, Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA.|Department of Computer Science, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, USA.
Arun
A
Jayaraman
D061725:Accelerometry / Q000295:instrumentation*; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D000069550:Machine Learning; D008297:Male; D018670:Monitoring, Ambulatory / Q000295:instrumentation*; D009068:Movement; D011187:Posture; D013119:Spinal Cord Injuries / Q000150:complications / Q000503:physiopathology; D016138:Walking
Activity recognition; Activity tracking; At-home; Incomplete spinal cord injury; Machine learning