A machine learning study highlighting the challenges of fidgety movement recognition using vision and inertial sensors

Past medical research has shown that infantile movement and early neurological development are closely linked. Fidgety Movements that are reflex-like movement occurring in healthy infants less than 20-week of age have proven to be especially important, as past studies have highlighted that their absence is strongly correlated with the future development of neurological disorders like Cerebral Palsy. To provide a timely intervention, the General Movement Assessment was proposed as a screening medical procedure carried out by clinical personnel specifically trained to recognize Fidgety Movements. Because of its high cost in time and resources, several initiatives to automatize General Movement Assessment using machine learning techniques have been proposed in the literature. However none has managed to emerge as state-of-the-art so far. To investigate this problem, we conducted a study using deep learning approaches to learn disentangled feature representations for the recognition of Fidgety Movements using RGB-D video and Inertial Measurement Unit data acquired from 95 infants (average age: 13.79 ± 1.40 weeks). Our results show that while it is possible to learn features that characterize movement independently of subject information, obtaining feature representations that consistently generalize to subjects unseen during training remains challenging. More specifically, we observe that both the vision- and sensor-based modalities have specific challenges to be addressed for the recognition of Fidgety Movements. We discuss them and provide recommendations to help researchers interested in investigating this problem in the future.