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Wearable assistant for Parkinson's disease patients with the freezing of gait symptom.
Journal article

Wearable assistant for Parkinson's disease patients with the freezing of gait symptom.

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  • 2009-11-13
Published in:
  • IEEE transactions on information technology in biomedicine : a publication of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. - 2010
Acceleration
Aged
Algorithms
Clothing
Feedback, Sensory
Female
Gait Disorders, Neurologic
Humans
Male
Middle Aged
Monitoring, Ambulatory
Parkinson Disease
Self-Help Devices
Sensitivity and Specificity
Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted
English 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.
Language
  • English
Open access status
closed
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/global/documents/222920
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