Deep Learning Approaches for Classifying Children With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorder Using Inertial Measurement Unit Hand Tracking Data: Comparative Study

Background: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a prevalent neurodevelopmental condition that can be quite difficult to diagnose due to a lack of objective diagnostic methods in the currently used behavioral assessments. Recent work has shown that children with ASD have a higher incidence of motor control differences. A compilation of studies indicates that between 50% and 88% of the children with ASD have issues with movement control based on standardized motor assessments or parent-reported questionnaires. Objective: In this study, we assess a variety of deep learning approaches for the classification of ASD, utilizing data collected via inertial measurement unit (IMU) hand tracking during goal-directed arm movements. Methods: IMU hand tracking data were recorded from 41 school-aged children both with and without an ASD diagnosis to track their arm movements during a reach-to-clean up task. The IMU data were then preprocessed using a moving average and z score normalization to prepare the data for deep learning models. We evaluated the effectiveness of different deep learning models using the preprocessed data and a k-fold validation approach, as well as a patient-separated approach. Results: The best result was achieved with a convolutional autoencoder combined with long short-term memory layers, reaching an accuracy of 90.21% and an F1-score of 90.02%. Once the convolutional autoencoder+long short-term memory was determined to be the most effective model for this datatype, it was retrained and evaluated with a patient-separated dataset to assess the generalization capability of the model, achieving an accuracy of 91.87% and an F1-score of 93.66%. Conclusions: Our deep learning approach demonstrates that our models hold potential for facilitating ASD diagnosis in clinical settings. This work validates that there are significant differences between the physical movements of typically developing children and children with ASD, and these differences can be identified by analyzing hand-eye coordination skills. Additionally, we have validated that small-scale models can still achieve a high accuracy and good generalization when classifying medical data, opening the door for future research into diagnostic models that may not require massive amounts of data.

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