Automatic evaluation method for Functional Movement Screening based on a dual-stream network and feature fusion

Functional Movement Screening (FMS) is a movement pattern quality assessment system used to assess basic movement capabilities such as flexibility, stability, and pliability. Movement impairments and abnormal postures can be identified through peculiar movements and postures of the body. The reliability, validity, and accuracy of functional movement screening are difficult to test due to the subjective nature of the assessment. In this sense, this paper presents an automatic evaluation method for functional movement screening based on a dual-stream network and feature fusion. First, the RAFT algorithm is used to estimate the optical flow of a video, generating a set of optical flow images to represent the motion between consecutive frames. By inputting optical flow images and original video frames separately into the I3D model, it can better capture spatiotemporal features compared to the single-stream method. Meanwhile, this paper introduces a simple but effective attention fusion method that combines features extracted from optical flow with the original frames, enabling the network to focus on the most relevant parts of the input data, thereby improving prediction accuracy. The prediction of the four categories of FMS results was performed. It produced better correlation results compared to other more complex fusion protocols, with an accuracy improvement of 3% over the best-performing fusion method. Tests on public datasets showed that the evaluation metrics of the method proposed in this paper were the most advanced, with an accuracy improvement of approximately 4% compared to the currently superior methods. The use of deep learning methods makes it more objective and reliable to identify human movement impairments and abnormal postures.