Assessment of Parkinson’s Disease using Wearable Technology.
The article reviews the state of the art technology that performs gait analysis of patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease and also plots out the related variability according to characteristics such as the number of sensors, location of sensors, spatio-temporal parameters, and so on.
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder and one of the widely seen biomarkers that are seen in patients suffering from PD is “Gait Impairments”.
The wearable sensor system provides useful spatio-temporal parameters to investigate the progression of gait problems in Parkinson’s disease and is a convenient, non-invasive, low-cost solution that is widely used to perform gait analysis. Being able to diagnose and monitor the progression of PD patients makes wearable sensors very useful to evaluate clinical efficacy before and after therapeutic interventions. Gait analysis methods vary in relation to sensor type, sensor location, measurement duration/length, gait parameters, and patients’ clinical measurements.
However, it shows non-uniform results in terms of the number, location, selected parameters and other characteristics of the wearable sensor. The current literature does not have enough evidence to support a clinical decision on the best system characteristics (number and positions of sensors) that can be selected for effective clinical results, and there is no consensus.
Nevertheless, many applications offer and inform the potential of wearable sensor systems and provide an assessment of new digital gait parameters.
This review can be seen as a first step toward defining a consensus set-up (or a number of set-ups that can be suggested for different parameters), and a minimum subset of parameters that should be present in all studies. Gait speed, cadence, and stride length were the most reported parameters; further work should be done to choose the most effective parameters for different aims (e.g., to evaluate fall risk, to evaluate efficacy of treatment, to evaluate the difference between healthy patients and PD, etc.). In addition, In a patient-centric approach the development of wearable sensor assessment protocols and derived outcome parameters should consider the usability aspects of the test as well as the impact of the derived outcome metrics for the patients in order to establish the method in clinical routine.
Future research should focus on standardizing the measurement setup and selecting which spatio-temporal parameters are the most informative to analyze gait in PD. These parameters should be provided as standard assessments in all studies to increase replicability and comparability of results.
