Artificial Intelligence for skeleton-based physical rehabilitation action evaluation: A systematic review.

Journal: Computers in biology and medicine
Published Date:

Abstract

Performing prescribed physical exercises during home-based rehabilitation programs plays an important role in regaining muscle strength and improving balance for people with different physical disabilities. However, patients attending these programs are not able to assess their action performance in the absence of a medical expert. Recently, vision-based sensors have been deployed in the activity monitoring domain. They are capable of capturing accurate skeleton data. Furthermore, there have been significant advancements in Computer Vision (CV) and Deep Learning (DL) methodologies. These factors have promoted the solutions for designing automatic patient's activity monitoring models. Then, improving such systems' performance to assist patients and physiotherapists has attracted wide interest of the research community. This paper provides a comprehensive and up-to-date literature review on different stages of skeleton data acquisition processes for the aim of physio exercise monitoring. Then, the previously reported Artificial Intelligence (AI) - based methodologies for skeleton data analysis will be reviewed. In particular, feature learning from skeleton data, evaluation, and feedback generation for the purpose of rehabilitation monitoring will be studied. Furthermore, the associated challenges to these processes will be reviewed. Finally, the paper puts forward several suggestions for future research directions in this area.

Authors

  • Sara Sardari
    Centre for Computational Science & Mathematical Modelling, Coventry University, Coventry, UK; School of Information Technology, Faculty of Science Engineering and Built Environment, Deakin University, Geelong, Vic, Australia. Electronic address: sardaris@coventry.ac.uk.
  • Sara Sharifzadeh
    Faculty of Science and Engineering, Swansea University, Swansea SA2 8PP, UK.
  • Alireza Daneshkhah
    Research Centre for Computational Science and Mathematical Modelling, Coventry University, Coventry CV1 2JH, UK.
  • Bahareh Nakisa
    School of Information Technology, Faculty of Science Engineering and Built Environment, Deakin University, Geelong, Vic, Australia.
  • Seng W Loke
    School of Information Technology, Faculty of Science Engineering and Built Environment, Deakin University, Geelong, Vic, Australia.
  • Vasile Palade
    Centre for Data Science, Coventry University, Coventry, United Kingdom. Electronic address: vasile.palade@coventry.ac.uk.
  • Michael J Duncan
    Centre for Sport, Exercise and Life Sciences, Coventry University, Coventry, UK.