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Detecting freezing of gait with a tri-axial accelerometer in Parkinson’s disease patients

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Abstract

Freezing of gait (FOG) is a common motor symptom of Parkinson’s disease (PD), which presents itself as an inability to initiate or continue gait. This paper presents a method to monitor FOG episodes based only on acceleration measurements obtained from a waist-worn device. Three approximations of this method are tested. Initially, FOG is directly detected by a support vector machine (SVM). Then, classifier’s outputs are aggregated over time to determine a confidence value, which is used for the final classification of freezing (i.e., second and third approach). All variations are trained with signals of 15 patients and evaluated with signals from another 5 patients. Using a linear SVM kernel, the third approach provides 98.7 % accuracy and a geometric mean of 96.1 %. Moreover, it is investigated whether frequency features are enough to reliably detect FOG. Results show that these features allow the method to detect FOG with accuracies above 90 % and that frequency features enable a reliable monitoring of FOG by using simply a waist sensor.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been performed in the framework of the FP7 project REMPARK ICT-287677, which is funded by the European Community. The author(s) would like to acknowledge the contributions of their colleagues from REMPARK Consortium (http://www.rempark.eu). We also like to thank all participants without whom this publication would not have been possible.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. neusta mobile solutions GmbH (NMS), Konsul-Smidt-Str. 24, 28217, Bremen, Germany

    Claas Ahlrichs

  2. Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AGKI), University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Michael Lawo

  3. Technical Research Centre for Dependency Care and Autonomous Living(CETpD), Universitat Politcnica de Catalunya, Vilanova i la Geltr, Spain

    Albert Samà, Joan Cabestany, Daniel Rodríguez-Martín & Carlos Pérez-López

  4. Electrical & Electronic Engineering Department, NUI Galway, Galway, Ireland

    Dean Sweeney, Leo R. Quinlan, Gearòid Ò Laighin & Alejandro Rodríguez-Molinero

  5. School of Medicine, NUI Galway, Galway, Ireland

    Timothy Counihan & Patrick Browne

  6. Maccabi Healthcare Services, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Lewy Hadas & Gabriel Vainstein

  7. IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia, Rome, Italy

    Alberto Costa & Roberta Annicchiarico

  8. Unidad de Parkinson y trastornos del movimiento (UParkinson), Barcelona, Spain

    Sheila Alcaine, Berta Mestre, Paola Quispe & Àngels Bayes

  9. Niccolò Cusano University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Alberto Costa

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  1. Claas Ahlrichs
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  2. Albert Samà
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  3. Michael Lawo
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  14. Alberto Costa
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  15. Roberta Annicchiarico
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  20. Alejandro Rodríguez-Molinero
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Correspondence to Claas Ahlrichs.

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Ahlrichs, C., Samà, A., Lawo, M. et al. Detecting freezing of gait with a tri-axial accelerometer in Parkinson’s disease patients. Med Biol Eng Comput 54, 223–233 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-015-1395-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-015-1395-3

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