Parkinson’s Disease Tremor Detection in the Wild Using Wearable Accelerometers

• Main Authors: Rubén San-Segundo, Ada Zhang, Alexander Cebulla, Stanislav Panev, Griffin Tabor, Katelyn Stebbins, Robyn E. Massa, Andrew Whitford, Fernando de la Torre, Jessica Hodgins
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-10-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: in-the-wild supervision; Parkinson’s disease; tremor detection; wearable accelerometers
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/20/5817

Continuous in-home monitoring of Parkinson’s Disease (PD) symptoms might allow improvements in assessment of disease progression and treatment effects. As a first step towards this goal, we evaluate the feasibility of a wrist-worn wearable accelerometer system to detect PD tremor in the wild (uncontrolled scenarios). We evaluate the performance of several feature sets and classification algorithms for robust PD tremor detection in laboratory and wild settings. We report results for both laboratory data with accurate labels and wild data with weak labels. The best performance was obtained using a combination of a pre-processing module to extract information from the tremor spectrum (based on non-negative factorization) and a deep neural network for learning relevant features and detecting tremor segments. We show how the proposed method is able to predict patient self-report measures, and we propose a new metric for monitoring PD tremor (i.e., percentage of tremor over long periods of time), which may be easier to estimate the start and end time points of each tremor event while still providing clinically useful information.