Supervised Classification of Bradykinesia for Parkinson's Disease Diagnosis from Smartphone Videos

Abstract

Slowness of movement, known as bradykinesia, is an important early symptom of Parkinson's disease. This symptom is currently assessed subjectively by clinical experts. However, expert assessment has been shown to be subject to inter-rater variability. We propose a low-cost, contactless system using smarthphone videos to automatically determine the presence of bradykinesia. Using 70 videos recorded in a pilot study, we predicted the presence of bradykinesia with an estimated test accuracy of 0.79 and the presence of Parkinson's disease with estimated test accuracy 0.63. Even on a small set of pilot data this accuracy is comparable to that recorded by blinded human experts.