Remote Physical Frailty Monitoring–The Application of Deep Learning-Based Image Processing in Tele-Health

Remote screening physical frailty (PF) may assist in triaging patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) who are in clinical priorities to visit a clinical center for preventive care. Conventional PF assessment tools have however limited feasibility for remote patient monitoring applications. To improve the safety of PF assessment, we previously developed and validated a quick and safe PF screening tool called Frailty Meter (FM). FM works by quantifying weakness, slowness, rigidity, and exhaustion during a 20-second repetitive elbow flexion/extension task using a wrist-worn sensor and generates a frailty index (FI) ranging from zero to one; higher values indicate progressively greater severity of frailty. However, the use of wrist-sensor limits its applications in telemedicine and remote patient monitoring. In this study, we developed a sensor-less FM based on deep learning-based image processing, which can be easily integrated into mobile health and enables remote assessment of physical frailty. The sensor-less FM extracts kinematic features of the forearm motion from the video of 20-second elbow flexion and extension recorded by a tablet camera, and then calculates frailty phenotypes and FI. To test the validity of sensor-less FM, 11 COPD patients admitted to a Telehealth pulmonary rehabilitation clinic and 10 healthy young volunteers (controls) were recruited. All participants completed the test indicating high feasibility. Strong correlations (0.72 < r < 0.99) were observed between the sensor-based FM and sensor-less FM to extract all frailty phenotypes and FI. After adjusting with age and body mass index(BMI), sensor-less FM enables distinguishing COPD group from controls (p<0.050) with the largest effect sizes observed for weakness (Cohen’s effect size d=2.24), frailty index (d=1.70), and slowness (d=1.70). These pilot findings suggest feasibility and proof of concept validity of this sensor-less FM toward remote assessment of PF in COPD patients.