Ambulatory monitoring of motor functions in patients with Parkinson"s disease using kinematic sensors

Parkinson's disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disease in the general population. Cardinal symptoms of Parkinson's disease are resting tremor, rigidity, akinesia and bradykinesia and in advanced stages, gait impairments, postural instability and complications of chronic treatment with levodopa such as motor dysfunctions and dyskinesia. Multitude and complexity of these motor symptoms and their variability over the time have made assessment of them a difficult task. Moreover, following the fluctuations of motor performance (ON/OFF fluctuations) of the PD patients throughout their daily activities by quantifying their motor symptoms is a major challenge. The aim of this thesis was to design and validate a portable ambulatory movement analysis system for long-term monitoring and qualitative and quantitative assessment of motor abnormalities of PD patients during daily activities. We have designed a new measurement system consisting of five independent, lightweight, autonomous sensing units based on kinematic sensors that can continuously record body movements during daily life. Using this system and by performing several clinical studies, both in controlled conditions and on free moving patients, we have prepared a database of different movement patterns of PD patients. This database was the basis to design several new algorithms for the analysis of tremor, bradykinesia, gait and posture. An accurate algorithm based on spectral estimation has been proposed to detect and quantify tremor during daily activities of PD patients with a resolution down to three seconds using gyroscopes attached to the forearms. By quantifying the speed, range and the frequency of the movements, we have proposed a new method to assess the bradykinesia and tested it both in controlled and free conditions. We found out that in the free moving patients, the outcomes of this algorithm show significant and good correlation to the established clinical scores. Regarding the detection and analysis of gait, we have developed and tested a method based on four sensors attached to the lower limbs that provided spatio-temporal parameters of gait with good accuracy. We further improved our method using a new biomechanical model that could predict the movements of thighs from the movements of shanks during walking. This way we could reduce the number of sensor sites on the body while keeping the same accuracy in estimation of the spatio-temporal parameters of gait. By combining a statistical classifier, to detect transitions between sitting and standing postures, and a fuzzy classifier, to detect the basic body postures, we have developed an algorithm to classify basic body posture allocations both in PD patients and aged matched healthy subjects. Finally, while currently no other objective ambulatory method exists to accurately detect the periods of ON and OFF in PD patients, by combining the outcomes of the above algorithms (tremor, gait, bradykinesia and posture) using a statistical approach, we have proposed a method to detect periods of these two states with a resolution of 10 minutes in free moving patients. We believe that the proposed system has a high potential both for the clinical applications and research purposes related to the patient with Parkinson's disease and possibly other neurological movement disorders.