A Classification and Calibration Procedure for Gesture Specific Home-Based Therapy Exercise in Young People With Cerebral Palsy

Movement-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.

Automated summary

Movement-based video games can offer engaging practice for youth with cerebral palsy, and home-based gesture calibration and classification are important for personalized therapy. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of using electromyography and inertial sensors to detect therapeutic hand gestures, with features sensitive to signs of CP contributing significantly to classification. The results show promising outcomes in improving manual ability and increasing practice time for youth with cerebral palsy.