Machine Learning to Improve Energy Expenditure Estimation in Children With Disabilities: A Pilot Study in Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Children with physical impairments are at a greater risk for obesity and decreased physical activity. A better understanding of physical activity pattern and energy expenditure (EE) would lead to a more targeted approach to intervention. OBJECTIVE: This study focuses on studying the use of machine-learning algorithms for EE estimation in children with disabilities. A pilot study was conducted on children with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) to identify important factors for determining EE and develop a novel algorithm to accurately estimate EE from wearable sensor-collected data. METHODS: There were 7 boys with DMD, 6 healthy control boys, and 22 control adults recruited. Data were collected using smartphone accelerometer and chest-worn heart rate sensors. The gold standard EE values were obtained from the COSMED K4b2 portable cardiopulmonary metabolic unit worn by boys (aged 6-10 years) with DMD and controls. Data from this sensor setup were collected simultaneously during a series of concurrent activities. Linear regression and nonlinear machine-learning-based approaches were used to analyze the relationship between accelerometer and heart rate readings and COSMED values. RESULTS: Existing calorimetry equations using linear regression and nonlinear machine-learning-based models, developed for healthy adults and young children, give low correlation to actual EE values in children with disabilities (14%-40%). The proposed model for boys with DMD uses ensemble machine learning techniques and gives a 91% correlation with actual measured EE values (root mean square error of 0.017). CONCLUSIONS: Our results confirm that the methods developed to determine EE using accelerometer and heart rate sensor values in normal adults are not appropriate for children with disabilities and should not be used. A much more accurate model is obtained using machine-learning-based nonlinear regression specifically developed for this target population.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".