InSEption: A Robust Mechanism for Predicting FoG Episodes in PD Patients

Abstract

The integration of IoT and deep learning provides the opportunity for continuous monitoring and evaluation of patients’ health status, leading to more personalized treatment and improved quality of life. This study explores the potential of deep learning to predict episodes of freezing of gait (FoG) in Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients. Initially, a literature review was conducted to determine the state of the art; then, two inception-based models, namely LN-Inception and InSEption, were introduced and tested using the Daphnet dataset and an additional novel medium-sized dataset collected from an IMU (inertial measuring unit) sensor. The results show that both models performed very well, outperforming or achieving performance comparable to the state-of-the-art. In particular, the InSEption network showed exceptional performance, achieving a 6% increase in macro F1 score compared to the inception-only-based counterpart on the Daphnet dataset. In a newly introduced IMU dataset, InSEption scored 97.2% and 98.6% in terms of F1 and AUC, respectively. This can be attributed to the added squeeze and excitation blocks and the domain-specific oversampling methods used for training. The benefits of using the Inception mechanism for signal data and its potential for integration into wearable IoT are validated.