Automatic Parkinson’s Disease Diagnosis with Wearable Sensor Technology for Medical Robot

Abstract

The clinical diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease (PD) has been the subject of medical robotics research. Currently, a hot research topic is how to accurately assess the severity of Parkinson’s disease patients and enable medical robots to better assist patients in the rehabilitation process. The walking task on the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) is a well-established diagnostic criterion for PD patients. However, the clinical diagnosis of PD is determined based on the clinical experience of neurologists, which is subjective and inaccurate. Therefore, in this study, an automated diagnostic method for PD based on an improved multiclass support vector machine (MCSVM) is proposed in which wearable sensors are used. Kinematic analysis was performed to extract gait features, both spatiotemporal and kinematic, from the installed IMU and pressure sensors. Comparison experiments of three different kernel functions and linear trajectory experiments were designed. The experimental results show that the accuracies of the three kernel functions of the proposed improved MCSVM are 92.43%, 93.45%, and 95.35%. The simulation trajectories of the MCSVM are the closest to the real trajectories, which shows that the technique performs better in the clinical diagnosis of PD.