Feature-Set-Engineering for Detecting Freezing of Gait in Parkinson's Disease using Deep Recurrent Neural Networks

Freezing of gait (FoG) is a common gait disability in Parkinson's disease, that usually appears in its advanced stage. Freeze episodes are associated with falls, injuries, and psychological consequences, negatively affecting the patients' quality of life. For detecting FoG episodes automatically, a highly accurate detection method is necessary. This paper presents an approach for detecting FoG episodes utilizing a deep recurrent neural network (RNN) on 3D-accelerometer measurements. We investigate suitable features and feature combinations extracted from the sensors' time series data. Specifically, for detecting FoG episodes, we apply a deep RNN with Long Short-Term Memory cells. In our experiments, we perform both user dependent and user independent experiments, to detect freeze episodes. Our experimental results show that the frequency domain features extracted from the trunk sensor are the most informative feature group in the subject independent method, achieving an average AUC score of 93%, Specificity of 90% and Sensitivity of 81%. Moreover, frequency and statistical features of all the sensors are identified as the best single input for the subject dependent method, achieving an average AUC score of 97%, Specificity of 96% and Sensitivity of 87%. Overall, in a comparison to state-of-the-art approaches from literature as baseline methods, our proposed approach outperforms these significantly.