Predicting TUG score from gait characteristics with video analysis and machine learning

Fall is a leading cause of death which suffers the elderly and society. Timed Up and Go (TUG) test is a common tool for fall risk assessment. In this paper, we propose a method for predicting TUG score from gait characteristics extracted from video with computer vision and machine learning technologies. First, 3D pose is estimated from video captured with 2D and 3D cameras during human motion and then a group of gait characteristics are computed from 3D pose series. After that, copula entropy is used to select those characteristics which are mostly associated with TUG score. Finally, the selected characteristics are fed into the predictive models to predict TUG score. Experiments on real world data demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method. As a byproduct, the associations between TUG score and several gait characteristics are discovered, which laid the scientific foundation of the proposed method and make the predictive models such built interpretable to clinical users.Comment: Experimental results and discussion are revised. The code for estimating copula entropy is available at https://github.com/majianthu/copen

Associations between finger tapping, gait and fall risk with application to fall risk assessment

As the world ages, elderly care becomes a big concern of the society. To address the elderly's issues on dementia and fall risk, we have investigated smart cognitive and fall risk assessment with machine learning methodology based on the data collected from finger tapping test and Timed Up and Go (TUG) test. Meanwhile, we have discovered the associations between cognition and finger motion from finger tapping data and the association between fall risk and gait characteristics from TUG data. In this paper, we jointly analyze the finger tapping and gait characteristics data with copula entropy. We find that the associations between certain finger tapping characteristics ('number of taps', 'average interval of tapping', 'frequency of tapping' of both hands of bimanual inphase and those of left hand of bimanual untiphase) and TUG score are relatively high. According to this finding, we propose to utilize this associations to improve the predictive models of automatic fall risk assessment we developed previously. Experimental results show that using the characteristics of both finger tapping and gait as inputs of the predictive models of predicting TUG score can considerably improve the prediction performance in terms of MAE compared with using only one type of characteristics

Predicting MMSE Score from Finger-Tapping Measurement

Dementia is a leading cause of diseases for the elderly. Early diagnosis is very important for the elderly living with dementias. In this paper, we propose a method for dementia diagnosis by predicting MMSE score from finger-tapping measurement with machine learning pipeline. Based on measurement of finger tapping movement, the pipeline is first to select finger-tapping attributes with copula entropy and then to predict MMSE score from the selected attributes with predictive models. Experiments on real world data show that the predictive models such developed present good prediction performance. As a byproduct, the associations between certain finger-tapping attributes ('Number of taps', 'Average of intervals', and 'Frequency of taps' of both hands of bimanual in-phase task) and MMSE score are discovered with copula entropy, which may be interpreted as the biological relationship between cognitive ability and motor ability and therefore makes the predictive models explainable. The selected finger-tapping attributes can be considered as dementia biomarkers.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, 2 table