Classification of tetraplegics through automatic movement evaluation.

The general problem of classification of functional movements in humans with spinal cord injuries requires the following questions to be answered: what are the essential kinematic parameters that we have to observe during the movement? Is it possible to estimate preserved motor skills based on kinematics? Which computational method for identification is suited to geometric feature analysis? To answer these questions we have developed the methodology which has two phases: (1) recordings of a series of specified arm movements; and (2) custom made software for graphical presentation of arm movements and the design of wavelet and neural networks for movement classification. The proposed protocol is automated and both graphical presentation and neural networks allow easy interpretation of the instrumented assessment to accomplish automatic classification of arm movements in tetraplegics. The protocol was evaluated on 16 spinal cord injury (SCI) patients and seven healthy control subjects for three different arm movements. The classification rate yielded results in the range 46-100% for movement trials that were tested. The application of neural networks for classification of arm movements is completed with results using different neural networks: backpropagation, radial basis, recurrent (Elman), self-organizing and Learning Vector Quantization (LVQ).