Biomechanical Study and Prediction of Lower Extremity Joint Movements Using Bayesian Regularization-Based Backpropagation Neural Network

This work aims to estimate the lower-limb joint angles in the sagittal plane using Microsoft Kinect-based experimental setup and apply an efficient machine learning technique for predicting the same based on kinematic, spatiotemporal, and biological parameters. Ten healthy participants from 19 to 50 years (33 ± 11.24 years) were asked to walk in front of the Kinect camera. Based on the skeleton image, the biomechanical hip, knee, and ankle joint angles of the lower-limb were measured using ni-labview. Thereafter, two Bayesian regularization-based backpropagation multilayer perceptron neural network models were designed to predict the joint angles in the stance and swing phase. The joint angles of two individuals, as a testing dataset, were predicted and compared with the experimental results. The test correlation coefficient for predicted joint angles has shown a promising effect of the proposed neural network models. Finally, a qualitative comparison was presented between the joint angles of healthy people and unhealthy people of similar age groups.