Automatic Diagnosis of Cerebral Palsy Gait Using Computational Intelligence Techniques: A Low-Cost Multi-Sensor Approach

Automatic diagnosing of Cerebral Palsy (CP) gait is crucial in quantitative evaluation of a therapeutic intervention. Existing systems for such gait assessment are expensive and require user intervention. This study proposes a low-cost gait assessment system equipped with multiple Kinect sensors. Forty subjects (20 CP patients and 20 normal) were recruited for the experiment. To remove outlier frames from the combined gait signal of multiple sensors a data driven algorithm was proposed. Different supervised classifiers along with extreme learning machine were investigated to diagnose CP gait. In addition, a feature level analysis was also performed. Several spatio-temporal features (i.e. step length, stride length, stride time, etc.) were extracted. The strength of walking ratio, a speed invariant feature, to detect CP gait was thoroughly analyzed. The proposed system outperformed state-of-the-art with ≈98% of accuracy (sensitivity: 100%, and specificity: 96.87%). Results indicate a substantial improvement in abnormality detection performance after outlier removal. Based on ReliefF feature ranking algorithm, walking ratio ranked the best among other classical gait features. Performance of all classifiers increased substantially using walking ratio as a feature. Extreme learning machine demonstrated a competing performance in all cases. The higher classification accuracy of this low-cost system using only a single feature makes it attractive for CP gait detection.