  In chronic pain rehabilitation, physiotherapists adapt physical activity to
patients' performance based on their expression of protective behavior,
gradually exposing them to feared but harmless and essential everyday
activities. As rehabilitation moves outside the clinic, technology should
automatically detect such behavior to provide similar support. Previous works
have shown the feasibility of automatic protective behavior detection (PBD)
within a specific activity. In this paper, we investigate the use of deep
learning for PBD across activity types, using wearable motion capture and
surface electromyography data collected from healthy participants and people
with chronic pain. We approach the problem by continuously detecting protective
behavior within an activity rather than estimating its overall presence. The
best performance reaches mean F1 score of 0.82 with leave-one-subject-out cross
validation. When protective behavior is modelled per activity type, performance
is mean F1 score of 0.77 for bend-down, 0.81 for one-leg-stand, 0.72 for
sit-to-stand, 0.83 for stand-to-sit, and 0.67 for reach-forward. This
performance reaches excellent level of agreement with the average experts'
rating performance suggesting potential for personalized chronic pain
management at home. We analyze various parameters characterizing our approach
to understand how the results could generalize to other PBD datasets and
different levels of ground truth granularity.
