Achieving precision assessment of functional clinical scores for upper extremity using IMU-Based wearable devices and deep learning methods

Stroke is a serious cerebrovascular disease, and rehabilitation following the acute phase is particularly crucial. Not all rehabilitation outcomes are favorable, highlighting the necessity for personalized rehabilitation. Precision assessment is essential for tailored rehabilitation interventions. Wearable inertial measurement units (IMUs) and deep learning approaches have been effectively employed for motor function prediction. This study aims to use machine learning techniques and data collected from IMUs to assess the Fugl-Meyer upper extremity subscale for post-stroke patients with motor dysfunction. IMUs signals from 120 patients were collected during a clinical trial. These signals were fed into a gated recurrent unit network to complete the scoring of individual actions, which were then aggregated to obtain the total score. Simultaneously, on the basis of the internal correlation between the Fugl-Meyer assessment and the Brunnstrom scale, Brunnstrom stage prediction models of the arm and hand were established via the random forest and extremely randomized trees algorithm. The experimental results show that the proposed models can score Fugl-Meyer items with a high accuracy of 92.66%. The R² between the doctors' score and the model's score is 0.9838. The Brunnstrom stage prediction models can predict high-quality stages, achieving a Spearman correlation coefficient of 0.9709. The application of the proposed method enables precision assessment of patients' upper extremity motor function, thereby facilitating more personalized rehabilitation programs to achieve optimal recovery outcomes. Trial registration: Clinical trial of telerehabilitation training and intelligent evaluation system, ChiCTR2200061310, Registered 20 June 2022-Retrospective registration.