A Wearable System for Gait Training in Subjects with Parkinson’s Disease

Abstract

In this paper, a system for gait training and rehabilitation for Parkinson's disease (PD) patients in a daily life setting is presented. It is based on a wearable architecture aimed at the provision of real-time auditory feedback. Recent studies have, in fact, shown that PD patients can receive benefit from a motor therapy based on auditory cueing and feedback, as happens in traditional rehabilitation contexts with verbal instructions given by clinical operators. To this extent, a system based on a wireless body sensor network and a smartphone has been developed. The system enables real-time extraction of gait spatio-temporal features and their comparison with a patient's reference walking parameters captured in the lab under clinical operator supervision. Feedback is returned to the user in form of vocal messages, encouraging the user to keep her/his walking behavior or to correct it. This paper describes the overall concept, the proposed usage scenario and the parameters estimated for the gait analysis. It also presents, in detail, the hardware-software architecture of the system and the evaluation of system reliability by testing it on a few subjects.

An IMU-to-Body Alignment Method Applied to Human Gait Analysis

“…The estimation of joint angular displacements is a fundamental part of human motion analysis and involves the detection of joint position and spatial orientation [6]. The relevance of these parameters is observed in many clinical scenarios such as gait training and rehabilitation in patients with stroke, Parkinson’s disease and cerebral palsy [7,8,9]. …”

Design and Implementation of Foot-Mounted Inertial Sensor Based Wearable Electronic Device for Game Play Application

“…Filippo [24] proposes a system that is able to provide real-time computation of gait features, and feeds back to the user in the purpose of helping him/her execute the most effective gait pattern. Joonbum [25] makes use of pressure sensor to monitor patients’ gait by observing the ground reaction force (GRF) and the center of GRF to give the quantitative information of gait abnormality.…”

A holistic approach to assess the feasability of telehealth for Parkinson's disease management

“…Also in this case different approaches have been suggested and studied, in some cases, the sensors have been integrated with other sensors of the same kind conforming Body Area Networks (BAN) able to cover a wider range of symptoms or improving the accuracy in the detection and assessment of symptoms. In other cases, they were integrated with other different sensors or devices conforming more complex systems such as closed-loop system (HELP project [438]), telehealth systems (PERFORM [14]- [16] or SENSE-PARK [333], [334]), platforms to deal with the FoG using cueing (CuPID [408], [409] or REMPARK [453], [455]), complex system for tremor suppression (NEUROTREMOR [463])and also they have been integrated into a web-based applications enabling home monitoring of patients with (PD) using wearable sensors (Mercury [450], [452]). …”

“…Then, feedback is returned to the user in form of vocal messages, encouraging the user to keep her/his walking behavior or to correct it. Casamassima et al (2013Casamassima et al ( , 2014 describe the overall concept, the proposed usage scenario and the parameters estimated for the gait analysis. They also presented, in detail, the hardware and software architecture of the system together with a evaluation of the system reliability by testing it on a few subjects [408], [409].…”

“…Casamassima et al (2013Casamassima et al ( , 2014 describe the overall concept, the proposed usage scenario and the parameters estimated for the gait analysis. They also presented, in detail, the hardware and software architecture of the system together with a evaluation of the system reliability by testing it on a few subjects [408], [409]. CuPiD monitors and records remotely a patient's activity in training and clinicians are able to supervise their progression, change the training to fit an individual's needs and assess problems that occur using a computer interface.…”