Objective Assessment for Classification of Muscle Spasticity Level

An important component in rehabilitation process is the ability to assess the level of muscle spasticity in objective manner. Despite of many proven evidences, current method of assessments is still based on subjective evaluation which relies heavily on the skill, experience and intuition of the therapists. Thus, this paper aims to develop a classifier of muscle spasticity level based on the clinical data collected from the affected upper limb. In order to quantify the assessment systematically, a standard Modified Ashworth Scale (MAS) tool was used to help develop ANFIS and SVM models. Data were collected from twenty-five subjects that met the requirements with prior consent. The data went through preprocessing stage and analyzed before seven features from the data were selected to form the dataset. The features were then went through one way ANOVA test to evaluate their statistically significant differences so as to best predict the assessment levels. Based on the results from the analysis, four features were finally selected and were then used to train the classifiers. The overall results from the ANFIS and SVM classifiers accorded the performance of 53.3% and 88.0% accuracy respectively in classifying the level of muscle spasticity.