Quantifying Movement Behavior of Chronic Low Back Pain Patients in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Chronic low back pain (CLBP) is a globally common musculoskeletal problem. Measuring the sensation of pain and the effect of a treatment has always been a challenge for healthcare. Here, we study how the movement data, collected while using a virtual reality (VR) program, could be used as an objective measurement in patients with CLBP. A specific data collection method based on VR was developed and used with CLBP patients and healthy volunteers. We demonstrate that the movement data in VR can be used to classify individuals in these two groups with a high accuracy by using logistic regression. The most discriminative features are the duration of the movements and the total variation of movement velocity. Furthermore, we show that hidden Markov models can divide movement data into meaningful segments, which creates possibilities for defining even more detailed features, with potential to improve accuracy, when larger datasets become available in the future.