Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, 00184 Rome, Italy.
Fondazione Don Carlo Gnocchi Onlus, 20121 Milan, Italy.
Sensors (Basel). 2018 Mar 20;18(3):919. doi: 10.3390/s18030919.
Monitoring gait quality in daily activities through wearable sensors has the potential to improve medical assessment in Parkinson's Disease (PD). In this study, four gait partitioning methods, two based on thresholds and two based on a machine learning approach, considering the four-phase model, were compared. The methods were tested on 26 PD patients, both in OFF and ON levodopa conditions, and 11 healthy subjects, during walking tasks. All subjects were equipped with inertial sensors placed on feet. Force resistive sensors were used to assess reference time sequence of gait phases. Goodness Index (G) was evaluated to assess accuracy in gait phases estimation. A novel synthetic index called Gait Phase Quality Index (GPQI) was proposed for gait quality assessment. Results revealed optimum performance (G < 0.25) for three tested methods and good performance (0.25 < G < 0.70) for one threshold method. The GPQI resulted significantly higher in PD patients than in healthy subjects, showing a moderate correlation with clinical scales score. Furthermore, in patients with severe gait impairment, GPQI was found higher in OFF than in ON state. Our results unveil the possibility of monitoring gait quality in PD through real-time gait partitioning based on wearable sensors.
通过可穿戴传感器监测日常活动中的步态质量有可能改善帕金森病(PD)的医学评估。在这项研究中,比较了四种步态分割方法,两种基于阈值,两种基于机器学习方法,同时考虑了四相模型。该方法在 26 名 PD 患者(左旋多巴治疗 OFF 和 ON 状态)和 11 名健康受试者中进行了测试,所有受试者都配备了放置在脚上的惯性传感器。力阻传感器用于评估步态相位的参考时间序列。采用良好指数(G)评估步态相位估计的准确性。提出了一种新的综合指数称为步态相位质量指数(GPQI),用于评估步态质量。结果表明,三种测试方法的性能最佳(G < 0.25),一种阈值方法的性能良好(0.25 < G < 0.70)。PD 患者的 GPQI 明显高于健康受试者,与临床量表评分呈中度相关。此外,在步态严重受损的患者中,OFF 状态下的 GPQI 高于 ON 状态。我们的结果揭示了通过基于可穿戴传感器的实时步态分割来监测 PD 患者步态质量的可能性。