Gait feature extraction in Parkinson's disease using low-cost accelerometers

The clinical hallmarks of Parkinson’s disease (PD) are movement poverty and slowness (i.e. bradykinesia), muscle rigidity, limb tremor or gait disturbances. Parkinson’s gait include slowness, shuffling, short steps, freezing of gait (FoG) and/or asymmetries in gait. There are currently no validated clinical instruments or device that allow a full characterization of gait disturbances in PD. As a step towards this goal, a four accelerometer-based system is proposed to increase the number of parameters that can be extracted to characterize parkinsonian gait disturbances such as FoG or gait asymmetries. After developing the hardware, an algorithm has been developed, that automatically epoched the signals on a stride-by-stride basis and quantified, among others, the gait velocity, the stride time,the stance and swing phases, the single and double support phases or the maximum acceleration at toe-off, as validated by visual inspection of video recordings during the task. The results obtained in a PD patient and an healthy volunteer are presented. The FoG detection will be improved using time-frequency analysis and the system is about to be validated with a state-of-the-art 3D movement analysis system.