Parkinson's disease patients face numerous motor symptoms that eventually make their life different from those of normal healthy controls. Out of these motor symptoms, tremor and bradykinesia, are relatively prevalent in all stages of this disease. The assessment of these symptoms is usually performed by traditional methods where the accuracy of results is still an open question. This research proposed a solution for an objective assessment of tremor and bradykinesia in subjects with PD (10 older adults aged greater than 60 years with tremor and 10 older adults aged greater than 60 years with bradykinesia) and 20 healthy older adults aged greater than 60 years. Physical movements were recorded by means of an AWEAR bracelet developed using inertial sensors, i.e., 3D accelerometer and gyroscope. Participants performed upper extremities motor activities as adopted by neurologists during the clinical assessment based on Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS). For discriminating the patients from healthy controls, temporal and spectral features were extracted, out of which non-linear temporal and spectral features show greater difference. Both supervised and unsupervised machine learning classifiers provide good results. Out of 40 individuals, neural net clustering discriminated 34 individuals in correct classes, while the KNN approach discriminated 91.7% accurately. In a clinical environment, the doctor can use the device to comprehend the tremor and bradykinesia of patients quickly and with higher accuracy.
Keywords: Parkinson’s disease; bracelet; bradykinesia; machine learning; tremor; wearable technology.