Wearable healthcare systems: A single channel accelerometer based anomaly detector for studies of gait freezing in Parkinson's disease

Abstract

The causality of gait freezing in patients with advanced Parkinson's disease is still not fully understood. Clinicians are interested in investigating the freezing of gait (FoG) histogram of patients in their daily life. To that end, one needs a real-time signal processing platform that can help record freezing information (e.g., timing and the duration of every gait freezing occurrences). Wearable wireless sensors have been proposed to monitor FoG epochs. Existing automated methods using accelerometers have been introduced with high accuracy performance only for subject-dependent settings (e.g., an individual offline training process). This is a troublesome for large scale out-of-lab deployment and time-consuming. In this work, we used spectral coherence analysis for accelerometer data to apply an anomaly detection approach. Conventional features such as energy and freezing index are introduced to help refine normal epochs while the anomaly scores from spectral coherence measures define FoG epochs. Using this new set of features, our new FoG detector for subject-independent settings achieves the mean ±SD sensitivity (specificity) of 89.2±0.3% (95.6 ± 0.3%). To our best knowledge, this is the best performance for automated subject-independent approaches in literature of freezing of gait detection.