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Wearable Assistant for Parkinson's Disease Patients With the Freezing of Gait Symptom

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Daniel Roggen

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Abstract

In this paper, we present a wearable assistant for Parkinson's disease (PD) patients with the freezing of gait (FOG) symptom. This wearable system uses on-body acceleration sensors to measure the patients' movements. It automatically detects FOG by analyzing frequency components inherent in these movements. When FOG is detected, the assistant provides a rhythmic auditory signal that stimulates the patient to resume walking. Ten PD patients tested the system while performing several walking tasks in the laboratory. More than 8 h of data were recorded. Eight patients experienced FOG during the study, and 237 FOG events were identified by professional physiotherapists in a post hoc video analysis. Our wearable assistant was able to provide online assistive feedback for PD patients when they experienced FOG. The system detected FOG events online with a sensitivity of 73.1% and a specificity of 81.6%. The majority of patients indicated that the context-aware automatic cueing was beneficial to them. Finally, we characterize the system performance with respect to the walking style, the sensor placement, and the dominant algorithm parameters.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Baechlin M, Plotnik M, Roggen D, Maidan I, Hausdorff J, Giladi N, Troester G

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine

Year: 2010

Volume: 14

Issue: 2

Pages: 436-446

ISSN (print): 1089-7771

ISSN (electronic): 1558-0032

Publisher: IEEE

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TITB.2009.2036165

DOI: 10.1109/TITB.2009.2036165

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