Programming :: Perl Script To Detect Mythfrontend As Non-responsive?

I need to figure out if mythfrontend is non responsive. If the frontend was closed by accident, this code restarts it for me as a cron job.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Env;
$ENV{DISPLAY}=':0';
my $result = `ps aux | grep front`;

[code]....

If I run the above code it works (mythfrontend restarts) however, there are times when the frontend becomes non-responsive and I'd like to detect a non-responsive state but I don't know how. Additionally, I don't have a keyboard on the mythfrontend, just the remote control.