Towards holistic free-living assessment in Parkinson's disease: Unification of gait and fall algorithms with a single accelerometer

Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2016 Aug:2016:651-654. doi: 10.1109/EMBC.2016.7590786.

Abstract

Technological developments have seen the miniaturization of sensors, small enough to be embedded in wearable devices facilitating unobtrusive and longitudinal monitoring in free-living environments. Concurrently, the advances in algorithms have been ad-hoc and fragmented. To advance the mainstream use of wearable technology and improved functionality of algorithms all methodologies must be unified and robustly tested within controlled and free-living conditions. Here we present and unify a (i) gait segmentation and analysis algorithm and (ii) a fall detection algorithm. We tested the unified algorithms on a cohort of young healthy adults within a laboratory. We then deployed the algorithms on longitudinal (7 day) accelerometer-based data from an older adult with Parkinson's disease (PD) to quantify real world gait and falls. We compared instrumented falls to a self-reported falls diary to test algorithm efficiency and discuss the use of unified algorithms to impact free-living assessment in PD where accurate recognition of gait may reduce the number of automated detected falls (38/week). This informs ongoing work to use gait and related outcomes as pragmatic clinical markers.

MeSH terms

  • Accelerometry / methods*
  • Accidental Falls*
  • Activities of Daily Living
  • Aged
  • Algorithms*
  • Gait / physiology*
  • Humans
  • Parkinson Disease / physiopathology*