A Single Wearable Sensor for Gait Analysis in Parkinson’s Disease: A Preliminary Study

Movement monitoring in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) is critical for quantifying disease progression and assessing how a subject responds to medication administration over time. In this work, we propose a continuous monitoring system based on a single wearable sensor placed on the lower back and an algorithm for gait parameters evaluation. In order to preliminarily validate the proposed system, seven PD subjects took part in an experimental protocol in preparation for a larger randomized controlled study. We validated the feasibility of our algorithm in a constrained environment through a laboratory scenario. Successively, it was tested in an unsupervised environment, such as the home scenario, for a total of almost 12 h of daily living activity data. During all phases of the experimental protocol, videos were shot to document the tasks. The obtained results showed a good accuracy of the proposed algorithm. For all PD subjects in the laboratory scenario, the algorithm for step identification reached a percentage error low of 2%, 99.13% of sensitivity and 100% of specificity. In the home scenario the Bland–Altman plot showed a mean difference of −3.29 and −1 between the algorithm and the video recording for walking bout detection and steps identification, respectively.