  For people with chronic pain, the assessment of protective behavior during
physical functioning is essential to understand their subjective pain-related
experiences (e.g., fear and anxiety toward pain and injury) and how they deal
with such experiences (avoidance or reliance on specific body joints), with the
ultimate goal of guiding intervention. Advances in deep learning (DL) can
enable the development of such intervention. Using the EmoPain MoCap dataset,
we investigate how attention-based DL architectures can be used to improve the
detection of protective behavior by capturing the most informative temporal and
body configurational cues characterizing specific movements and the strategies
used to perform them. We propose an end-to-end deep learning architecture named
BodyAttentionNet (BANet). BANet is designed to learn temporal and bodily parts
that are more informative to the detection of protective behavior. The approach
addresses the variety of ways people execute a movement (including healthy
people) independently of the type of movement analyzed. Through extensive
comparison experiments with other state-of-the-art machine learning techniques
used with motion capture data, we show statistically significant improvements
achieved by using these attention mechanisms. In addition, the BANet
architecture requires a much lower number of parameters than the state of the
art for comparable if not higher performances.
