Discriminating Between Parkinson's Disease and Control Sin-gle Task and Dual Task Groups Using Fractal Dimension Analysis of Center of Pressure (CoP)

Abstract

Abstract Parkinson disease (PD) is one of the well-known neurodegenerative disease that deteriorates human regular planning procedure, motor control, and movements especially walking. PD patients may pay more attention to their gait in order to compensate and achieve a more normal walking. So, this may cause more difficulties for them to do a dual-task (DT) while walking. The center of pressure (CoP) in walking is introduced as a theoretical point where represents distributed pressure between the floor and various parts of the foot. The CoP traces, represents the movement of a person to maintain a stable position in both the sagittal and frontal planes. The aim of this study is to report the results of discrimination between Parkinson and Control subject’s CoP data using nonlinear analysis such az Higuchi Fractal Dimension (HFD). The effect of single-task and dual-task on the non-linear characterestics of CoP in both Parkinson and Control groups are also investigated. A fractal pattern helps us to describe irregular and chaotic shapes such as CoP traces and its complexity. Given the fact that FD can be used to characterize the signal complexity, we explored the ability of HFD to discriminate between CoP signals of 21 PD patients and 15 control subjects.