Wearable Electronics Assess the Effectiveness of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation on Balance and Gait in Parkinson’s Disease Patients

Abstract

Currently, clinical evaluation represents the primary outcome measure in Parkinson’s disease (PD). However, clinical evaluation may underscore some subtle motor impairments, hidden from the visual inspection of examiners. Technology-based objective measures are more frequently utilized to assess motor performance and objectively measure motor dysfunction. Gait and balance impairments, frequent complications in later disease stages, are poorly responsive to classic dopamine-replacement therapy. Although recent findings suggest that transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) can have a role in improving motor skills, there is scarce evidence for this, especially considering the difficulty to objectively assess motor function. Therefore, we used wearable electronics to measure motor abilities, and further evaluated the gait and balance features of 10 PD patients, before and (three days and one month) after the tDCS. To assess patients’ abilities, we adopted six motor tasks, obtaining 72 meaningful motor features. According to the obtained results, wearable electronics demonstrated to be a valuable tool to measure the treatment response. Meanwhile the improvements from tDCS on gait and balance abilities of PD patients demonstrated to be generally partial and selective.

The effects of transcranial direct current stimulation on gait in patients with Parkinson’s disease: a systematic review

“…After eliminating 37 duplicates, 99 articles were excluded after screening by titles and abstracts. Two studies did not report sham stimulation results and were removed after reading the full text [ 40 , 41 ]. Although our search space included not only PD but also Parkinsonian syndromes, all studies identified with a randomized design were conducted in PD.…”

Head movement kinematics are altered during balance stability exercises in individuals with vestibular schwannoma

“…As a result, over the past several years numerous studies have taken advantage of an IMU-based approach to assessing postural stability in healthy as well as patient subjects (e.g., Refs. [35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47]). The application of computational methods to IMU-based data sets has demonstrated that this method can provide a clinician with a comparable ability to differentiate between individuals with vestibular loss and healthy controls as force platform posturography [48].…”

Transcranial direct current stimulation for balance rehabilitation in neurological disorders: A systematic review and meta-analysis

“…After reviewing titles and abstracts, 51 studies were included, and five additional studies (Forogh et al, 2018;Geroin et al, 2011;Madhavan et al, 2020;Manenti et al, 2016;Tahtis et al, 2014) were included from other systematic reviews on similar topics. After full text review, 19 studies were excluded due to the following reasons: without sham/CG (n = 9) (Alexoudi et al, 2018;Dumont et al, 2015;Hadoush et al, 2018;Mohammadi et al, 2021;Naro et al, 2020;Pilloni et al, 2019;Rezaee et al, 2020;Ricci et al, 2019;Solanki et al, 2021), another population (n = 3) (Jafarzadeh et al, 2019;Maldonado and Bernard, 2021;Manor et al, 2018), another intervention (n = 1) (Koganemaru et al, 2019), and another outcome (n = 6). Finally, 37 articles were included for the systematic reviews and 33 for the meta-analysis (two studies were J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f 10 excluded from the meta-analysis because of the design (case reports) and two due to incomplete data) (Costa et al, 2020;Forogh et al, 2018;Kaski et al, 2014a;Verheyden et al, 2013).…”