A First Experiment Towards Discomfort Assessment for Children with Cerebral Palsy Wearing an Exoskeleton

Rehabilitation devices like exoskeletons may be useful to promote walking for children with cerebral palsy (CP). However, exoskeletons can generate discomfort to the children. The contribution of this paper is to propose a protocol adapted to children to simulate the wearing of an exoskeleton, and to develop a stress detection model for healthy children. This is a first step towards discomfort detection on CP children. Fifteen healthy children participated in three test conditions (fear of falling, fear of novelty, physical discomfort) through two independent measurement campaigns (2021 and 2022). Six children from 2021 were used on a machine learning model as training set and nine from 2022 constituted the test set. Only the fear of falling condition generated stress effectively on the children. Linear regression was used to detect stress with two heart rate features. The model achieved a balanced accuracy of 84.44% when applied on the test set.