A Deep Learning Framework for Assessing Physical Rehabilitation Exercises

The article proposes a new framework for assessment of physical rehabilitation exercises based on a deep learning approach. The objective of the framework is automated quantification of patient performance in completing prescribed rehabilitation exercises, based on captured whole-body joint trajectories. The main components of the framework are metrics for measuring movement performance, scoring functions for mapping the performance metrics into numerical scores of movement quality, and deep neural network models for regressing quality scores of input movements via supervised learning. Furthermore, an overview of the existing methods for modeling and evaluation of rehabilitation movements is presented, encompassing various distance functions, dimensionality-reduction techniques, and movement models employed for this problem in prior studies. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that implements deep neural network for assessment of rehabilitation performance. Multiple deep network architectures are repurposed for the task in hand and are validated on a dataset of rehabilitation exercises.