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Prediction of lower limb joint angles and moments during gait using artificial neural networks

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Abstract

In recent years, gait analysis outside the laboratory attracts more and more attention in clinical applications as well as in life sciences. Wearable sensors such as inertial sensors show high potential in these applications. Unfortunately, they can only measure kinematic motions patterns indirectly and the outcome is currently jeopardized by measurement discrepancies compared with the gold standard of optical motion tracking. The aim of this study was to overcome the limitation of measurement discrepancies and the missing information on kinetic motion parameters using a machine learning application based on artificial neural networks. For this purpose, inertial sensor data—linear acceleration and angular rate—was simulated from a database of optical motion tracking data and used as input for a feedforward and long short-term memory neural network to predict the joint angles and moments of the lower limbs during gait. Both networks achieved mean correlation coefficients higher than 0.80 in the minor motion planes, and correlation coefficients higher than 0.98 in the sagittal plane. These results encourage further applications of artificial intelligence to support gait analysis.

The graphical abstract displays the processing of the data: IMU data is used as input to a feedforward and a long short-term memory neural network to predict the joint kinematics and kinetics of the lower limbs during gait

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Notes

  1. The input data is augmented by randomly rotating the relative orientation of the virtual sensor. Thus, the same motion is recorded, but distributed differently over the sensor axes.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of General Mechanics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Marion Mundt, Wolf Thomsen, Tom Witter, Arnd Koeppe, Franz Bamer & Bernd Markert

  2. Institute of Biomechanics and Orthopaedics, German Sport University Cologne, Cologne, Germany

    Sina David & Wolfgang Potthast

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  1. Marion Mundt
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Correspondence to Marion Mundt.

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Mundt, M., Thomsen, W., Witter, T. et al. Prediction of lower limb joint angles and moments during gait using artificial neural networks. Med Biol Eng Comput 58, 211–225 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-019-02061-3

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