Bag-of-steps: Predicting lower-limb fracture rehabilitation length by weight loading analysis

This paper presents bag-of-steps, a new methodology to predict the rehabilitation length of a patient by monitoring the weight he is bearing in his injured leg and using a predictive model based on the bag-of-words technique. A force sensor is used to monitor and characterize the patient’s gait, obtaining a set of step descriptors. These are later used to define a vocabulary of steps that can be used to describe rehabilitation sessions. Sessions are finally fed to a support vector machine classifier that performs the final rehabilitation estimation.