Smart Gait-Aid Glasses for Parkinson's Disease Patients

IEEE Trans Biomed Eng. 2017 Oct;64(10):2394-2402. doi: 10.1109/TBME.2017.2655344. Epub 2017 Jan 19.

Abstract

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a chronic progressive disease caused by loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra, degenerating the nervous system of a patient over time. Freezing of gait (FOG), which is a form of akinesia, is a symptom of PD. Meanwhile, recent studies show that the gait of PD patients experiencing FOG can be significantly improved by providing the regular visual or auditory patterns for the patients. In this paper, we propose a gait-aid system built upon smart glasses. Our system continuously monitors the gait and so on of a PD patient to detect FOG, and upon detection of FOG it projects visual patterns on the glasses as if the patterns were actually on the floor. Conducting experiments involving ten PD patients, we demonstrate that our system achieves the accuracy of 92.86 % in detecting FOG episodes and that it improves the gait speed and stride length of PD patients by 15.3 ∼ 37.2% and 18.7 ∼ 31.7%, respectively.

Publication types

  • Clinical Trial
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Aged
  • Aged, 80 and over
  • Biofeedback, Psychology / instrumentation*
  • Biofeedback, Psychology / methods
  • Equipment Design
  • Equipment Failure Analysis
  • Female
  • Gait Disorders, Neurologic / rehabilitation*
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Middle Aged
  • Neurological Rehabilitation / instrumentation*
  • Neurological Rehabilitation / methods
  • Parkinson Disease / rehabilitation*
  • Smartphone*
  • Therapy, Computer-Assisted / instrumentation*
  • Treatment Outcome
  • User-Computer Interface