Sensors (Apr 2023)

Evaluating Gait Impairment in Parkinson’s Disease from Instrumented Insole and IMU Sensor Data

  • Vassilis Tsakanikas,
  • Adamantios Ntanis,
  • George Rigas,
  • Christos Androutsos,
  • Dimitrios Boucharas,
  • Nikolaos Tachos,
  • Vasileios Skaramagkas,
  • Chariklia Chatzaki,
  • Zinovia Kefalopoulou,
  • Manolis Tsiknakis,
  • Dimitrios Fotiadis

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/s23083902
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 23, no. 8
p. 3902

Abstract

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Parkinson’s disease (PD) is characterized by a variety of motor and non-motor symptoms, some of them pertaining to gait and balance. The use of sensors for the monitoring of patients’ mobility and the extraction of gait parameters, has emerged as an objective method for assessing the efficacy of their treatment and the progression of the disease. To that end, two popular solutions are pressure insoles and body-worn IMU-based devices, which have been used for precise, continuous, remote, and passive gait assessment. In this work, insole and IMU-based solutions were evaluated for assessing gait impairment, and were subsequently compared, producing evidence to support the use of instrumentation in everyday clinical practice. The evaluation was conducted using two datasets, generated during a clinical study, in which patients with PD wore, simultaneously, a pair of instrumented insoles and a set of wearable IMU-based devices. The data from the study were used to extract and compare gait features, independently, from the two aforementioned systems. Subsequently, subsets comprised of the extracted features, were used by machine learning algorithms for gait impairment assessment. The results indicated that insole gait kinematic features were highly correlated with those extracted from IMU-based devices. Moreover, both had the capacity to train accurate machine learning models for the detection of PD gait impairment.

Keywords