Research Article
Parkinsons disease patients perspective on context aware wearable technology for auditive assistance
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/ICST.PERVASIVEHEALTH2009.6001, author={Marc Bachlin and Meir Plotnik and Daniel Roggen and Noit Inbar and Nir Giladi and Jeffrey Hausdorff and Gerhard Troster}, title={Parkinsons disease patients perspective on context aware wearable technology for auditive assistance}, proceedings={3d International ICST Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare}, proceedings_a={PERVASIVEHEALTH}, year={2009}, month={8}, keywords={Context awareness Event detection Immune system Legged locomotion Medical treatment Neurons Parkinson's disease Resumes Testing Wearable computers}, doi={10.4108/ICST.PERVASIVEHEALTH2009.6001} }- Marc Bachlin
Meir Plotnik
Daniel Roggen
Noit Inbar
Nir Giladi
Jeffrey Hausdorff
Gerhard Troster
Year: 2009
Parkinsons disease patients perspective on context aware wearable technology for auditive assistance
PERVASIVEHEALTH
ICST
DOI: 10.4108/ICST.PERVASIVEHEALTH2009.6001
Abstract
In this paper we present a wearable assistive technology for the freezing of gait (FOG) symptom in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), with emphasis on subjective user appreciation. Patients with advanced PD often suffer from FOG, which is a sudden and transient inability to move. It often causes falls, interferes with daily activities and significantly impairs quality of life. Because gait deficits in PD patients are often resistant to pharmacologic treatment, effective nonpharmacologic treatments are of special interest. We have developed an ambulatory device that detects FOG episodes in real-time and provides an automatic cueing sound until the subject resumes walking. We tested our device on ten PD patients. Eight patients experienced FOG during our study. Over 8h of data has been recorded and 237 FOG events have been identified by professional physiotherapists in a post-hoc video analysis. The device detected the FOG events with a sensitivity of 73.1% and a specificity of 81.6% on a 0.5sec frame based evaluation. The most important finding of the study is that we can provide online assistive feedback for FOG events in PD patients. Based on subjective reports, the majority of patients indicated that the context aware automatic cueing is beneficial for them.