Non-contact measures to monitor hand movement of people with rheumatoid arthritis using a monocular RGB camera

Hand movements play an essential role in a person’s ability to interact with the environment. In hand biomechanics, the range of joint motion is a crucial metric to quantify changes due to degenerative pathologies, such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA). RA is a chronic condition where the immune system mistakenly attacks the joints, particularly those in the hands. Optoelectronic motion capture systems are gold-standard tools to quantify changes but are challenging to adopt outside laboratory settings. Deep learning executed on standard video data can capture RA participants in their natural environments, potentially supporting objectivity in remote consultation. The three main research aims in this thesis were 1) to assess the extent to which current deep learning architectures, which have been validated for quantifying motion of other body segments, can be applied to hand kinematics using monocular RGB cameras, 2) to localise where in videos the hand motions of interest are to be found, 3) to assess the validity of 1) and 2) to determine disease status in RA. First, hand kinematics for twelve healthy participants, captured with OpenPose were benchmarked against those captured using an optoelectronic system, showing acceptable instrument errors below 10°. Then, a gesture classifier was tested to segment video recordings of twenty-two healthy participants, achieving an accuracy of 93.5%. Finally, OpenPose and the classifier were applied to videos of RA participants performing hand exercises to determine disease status. The inferred disease activity exhibited agreement with the in-person ground truth in nine out of ten instances, outperforming virtual consultations, which agreed only six times out of ten. These results demonstrate that this approach is more effective than estimated disease activity performed by human experts during video consultations. The end goal sets the foundation for a tool that RA participants can use to observe their disease activity from their home.Open Acces