A wearable health monitor to aid Parkinson disease treatment
Joshua Weaver · 2003
This thesis developed a wearable motion capture system to record Parkinson's patients performing daily activities during each of the three stages of their medication cycle. Five calibrated accelerome-ters continuously monitored motions of the subjects ' torso, wrists and ankles, and stored the resulting data onto a low-cost compact flash (CF) memory card. Five hours of data was recorded from a volunteer with PD wearing the motion recording system, along with the corresponding medication state rated by an observing physician. This data was divided into training and test sets, where one-quarter was reserved for testing. A neural network demonstrated 85 % correlation between data sampled from all five accelerome-ters to the dyskinetic medication state labelled by the physician. Noting inherent confusion between a sedentary patient with high dyskinesia and a properly medicated patient moving energetically, a second neural network was trained to identify periods of walking, with 75 % correlation. Using this