Kin-FOG: Automatic Simulated Freezing of Gait (FOG) Assessment System for Parkinson’s Disease

Abstract

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is one of the leading neurological disorders in the world with an increasing incidence rate for the elderly. Freezing of Gait (FOG) is one of the most incapacitating symptoms for PD especially in the later stages of the disease. FOG is a short absence or reduction of ability to walk for PD patients which can cause fall, reduction in patients’ quality of life, and even death. Existing FOG assessments by doctors are based on a patient’s diaries and experts’ manual video analysis which give subjective, inaccurate, and unreliable results. In the present research, an automatic FOG assessment system is designed for PD patients to provide objective information to neurologists about the FOG condition and the symptom’s characteristics. The proposed FOG assessment system uses an RGB-D sensor based on Microsoft Kinect V2 for capturing data for 5 healthy subjects who are trained to imitate the FOG phenomenon. The proposed FOG assessment system is called “Kin-FOG”. The analysis of foot joint trajectory of the motion captured by Kinect is used to find the FOG episodes. The evaluation of Kin-FOG is performed by two types of experiments, including: (1) simple walking (SW); and (2) walking with turning (WWT). Since the standing mode has features similar to a FOG episode, our Kin-FOG system proposes a method to distinguish between the FOG and standing episodes. Therefore, two general groups of experiments are conducted with standing state (WST) and without standing state (WOST). The gradient displacement of the angle between the foot and the ground is used as the feature for discriminating between FOG and standing modes. These experiments are conducted with different numbers of FOGs for getting reliable and general results. The Kin-FOG system reports the number of FOGs, their lengths, and the time slots when they occur. Experimental results demonstrate Kin-FOG has around 90% accuracy rate for FOG prediction in both experiments for different tasks (SW, WWT). The proposed Kin-FOG system can be used as a remote application at a patient’s home or a rehabilitation clinic for sending a neurologist the required FOG information. The reliability and generality of the proposed system will be evaluated for bigger data sets of actual PD subjects.

Detection and assessment of Parkinson's disease based on gait analysis: A survey

“…Recent vision-based works mainly focused on the use of RGB (Cao et al, 2021 ) or RGBD (Soltaninejad et al, 2019 ) cameras to detect FOG events in home-based environments. Similarly, most works first extracted 2D/3D key joints directly from visual inputs.…”

A Comparative Study of Time Frequency Representation Techniques for Freeze of Gait Detection and Prediction

“…Existing FOG assessment methods using these sensors can be categorized into different groups depending on the sensor types, sensor locations, extracted features, and the analytics methods. FOG detection can be conducted real-time or offline [ 47 ]. However, FOG detection and prediction are challenging tasks because of the variability of event duration and frequency.…”

“…In addition to the global FI threshold, they calculated the sensitivity and specificity of the FI threshold for each subject. Combining all task results, a sensitivity of and specificity of were achieved [ 47 ].…”

Recognition of Freezing of Gait in Parkinson’s Disease Based on Machine Vision

“…There are two main ways to extract motion information with this method. (1) Some studies have leveraged the 3D motion capture system represented by the Kinect depth camera to extract motion information related to detecting gait disorders ( Amini et al, 2019 ; Soltaninejad et al, 2019 ). However, these cameras require specialized equipment such as Microsoft Kinect, which is expensive.…”