Comparative Analysis of Supervised Classifiers for the Evaluation of Sarcopenia Using a sEMG-Based Platform

Sarcopenia is a geriatric condition characterized by a loss of strength and muscle mass, with a high impact on health status, functional independence and quality of life in older adults. To reduce the effects of the disease, just the diagnostic is not enough, it is necessary more than recognition. Surface electromyography is becoming increasingly relevant for the prevention and diagnosis of sarcopenia, also due to a wide diffusion of smart and minimally invasive wearable devices suitable for electromyographic monitoring. The purpose of this work is manifold. The first aim is the design and implementation of a hardware/software platform. It is based on the elaboration of surface electromyographic signals extracted from the Gastrocnemius Lateralis and Tibialis Anterior muscles, useful to analyze the strength of the muscles with the purpose of distinguishing three different "confidence" levels of sarcopenia. The second aim is to compare the efficiency of state of the art supervised classifiers in the evaluation of sarcopenia. The experimentation stage was performed on an "augmented" dataset starting from data acquired from 32 patients. The latter were distributed in an unbalanced manner on 3 "confidence" levels of sarcopenia. The obtained results in terms of classification accuracy demonstrated the ability of the proposed platform to distinguish different sarcopenia "confidence" levels, with highest accuracy value given by Support Vector Machine classifier, outperforming the other classifiers by an average of 7.7%.