Imbalance and Falls in Patients with Parkinson’s Disease: Causes and Recent Developments in Training and Sensor-Based Assessment

Abstract

Imbalance and falls in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) do not only reduce their quality of life but also their life expectancy. Aging-related symptoms as well as disease-specific motor and non-motor symptoms contribute to these conditions and should be treated when appropriate. In addition to an active lifestyle, advanced exercise training is useful and effective, especially for less medically responsive symptoms such as freezing of gait and postural instability at advanced stages. As treadmill training in non-immersive virtual reality, including dual tasks, significantly reduced the number of falls in PD patients, the mechanism(s) explaining this effect should be further investigated. Such research could help to select the most suitable patients and develop the most effective training protocols based on this novel technology. Real-life digital surrogate markers of mobility, such as those describing aspects of endurance, performance, and the complexity of specific movements, can further improve the quality of mobility assessment using wearables.