Automatic rehabilitation exercise task assessment of stroke patients based on wearable sensors with a lightweight multichannel 1D-CNN model

Abstract Approximately 75% of stroke survivors have movement dysfunction. Rehabilitation exercises are capable of improving physical coordination. They are mostly conducted in the home environment without guidance from therapists. It is impossible to provide timely feedback on exercises without suitable devices or therapists. Human action quality assessment in the home setting is a challenging topic for current research. In this paper, a low-cost HREA system in which wearable sensors are used to collect upper limb exercise data and a multichannel 1D-CNN framework is used to automatically assess action quality. The proposed 1D-CNN model is first pretrained on the UCI-HAR dataset, and it achieves a performance of 91.96%. Then, five typical actions were selected from the Fugl-Meyer Assessment Scale for the experiment, wearable sensors were used to collect the participants’ exercise data, and experienced therapists were employed to assess participants’ exercise at the same time. Following the above process, a dataset was built based on the Fugl-Meyer scale. Based on the 1D-CNN model, a multichannel 1D-CNN model was built, and the model using the Naive Bayes fusion had the best performance (precision: 97.26%, recall: 97.22%, F1-score: 97.23%) on the dataset. This shows that the HREA system provides accurate and timely assessment, which can provide real-time feedback for stroke survivors’ home rehabilitation.