Prediction of patient-reported physical activity scores from wearable accelerometer data: a feasibility study

Many diseases are characterized by limitations in mobility, including a wide range of musculoskeletal and neurological conditions. Reduced mobility impacts a patients ability to perform activities of daily living, which in turn reduces health-related quality of life. Mobility can be assessed by collecting patient-reported outcome scores from standardized questionnaires and by directly measuring physical activity parameters from wearable accelerometer data. In this work, we explored the relationship between subjectively and objectively measured mobility by training machine learning models to predict patient responses based on features derived from real-world acceleration data. Our method achieved up to 82% accuracy using a random forest classifier and set the basis to develop novel data-driven digital biomarkers for objective, quantitative and more frequent evaluation of patients’ mobility.