Dr. Ronald (James) Cotton Grand Rounds: Opportunities of AI Powered Gait Analysis for Rehabilitation, Part 1

Dr. Ronald (James) Cotton who is an electrical engineer, neuroscientist, and
physiatrist working as a physician scientist at Shirley Ryan Ability Lab, and assistant professor in
the Northwestern University Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.

PART 1
All of us probably believe and understand that how someone moves and walks is hugely
informative. People are exuding all this information about their health status, but we don't
measure it and obviously a core treatment of rehabilitation is how people move. We don't
actually routinely measure that and the reason is that we need better, more clinically accessible
tools to measure the clinically meaningful things about movement and then use those to guide
our treatment programs. We've never really had the tools. So, I'm going to discuss a plurality of
methods we've been developing in my lab, including tools that use multi-view video, monocular
video from a smartphone, for example, as well as sensor technology and then how we're trying to
extract clinically meaningful metrics from these methods. A challenge we've been addressing in
the lab is that the tools developed by the AI community don't necessarily solve the problems that
we need or produce clinically relevant outputs. It's really important to have confidence intervals
on what you measure. If we're going to use anything for decision making, we have to know we
can trust it. A problem with a lot of computer vision algorithms is they don't provide anything
like confidence intervals. Even if they pretend to, they're often uncalibrated and unreliable.