Quantification of Motor Impairment in Parkinson's Disease Using an Instrumented Timed Up and Go Test

Abstract

The Timed Up and Go (TUG) test is a clinical test to assess mobility in Parkinson's disease (PD). It consists of rising from a chair, walking, turning, and sitting. Its total duration is the traditional clinical outcome. In this study an instrumented TUG (iTUG) was used to supplement the quantitative information about the TUG performance of PD subjects: a single accelerometer, worn at the lower back, was used to record the acceleration signals during the test and acceleration-derived measures were extracted from the recorded signals. The aim was to select reliable measures to identify and quantify the differences between the motor patterns of healthy and PD subjects; in order to do so, besides comparing each measure individually to find significant group differences, feature selection and classification were used to identify the distinctive motor pattern of PD subjects. A subset of three features (two from Turning, one from the Sit-to-Walk component), combined with an easily-interpretable classifier (Linear Discriminant Analysis), was found to have the best accuracy in discriminating between healthy and early-mild PD subjects. These results suggest that the proposed iTUG can characterize PD motor impairment and, hence, may be used for evaluation, and, prospectively, follow-up, and monitoring of disease progression.

Quantitative assessment of hand motor function in cervical spinal disorder patients using target tracking tests

“…Employing a preprocessing step that examined the test-retest reliability eliminated unreliable features, as introduced in Palmerini et al [34]. The features extracted from the last two (out of three) tests were used to compute the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC); the first test was considered a practice trial and was not included in the reliability test.…”

“…This ensured a reliable quantification of motor impairment, since the decision function (i.e., kernel function) of a classifier or a regressor was constructed by mathematically combining features that were test-retest reliable. Palmerini et al provides more detailed information on this method [34].…”

Synchronized walking cadence for TUG in perturbed environments: Using Earcon or Tacton cues?

“…In order to evaluate and compare this setup, some clinical tests are available such as Time up and Go Test (TUG), Berg Balance Scaled (BBS) or the Tinetti assessment tool [12]. Since we evaluate the impact of environmental perturbations during walking and the use of biofeedback to correct the situation, an instrumented TUG is the most appropriate test as suggested in [13] for PD patients. This paper is organized as following: In the second section, a brief presentation of the related works is presented with the contribution of this research work.…”

A holistic approach to assess the feasability of telehealth for Parkinson's disease management

“…The final system was able to detect FoG events with an average sensitivity and specificity of more than 95%, and mean detection latency of 0.34s in user-dependent settings [327]. , was found to have the best accuracy in discriminating between healthy and early-mild PD subjects [412]. Also, Palmerini et al (2013) assessed the feasibility of using accelerometers to classify early PD subjects (two evaluations over a 1-year follow-up) with respect to age-matched control subjects.…”

“…, was found to have the best accuracy in discriminating between healthy and early-mild PD subjects [412]. Also, Palmerini et al (2013) assessed the feasibility of using accelerometers to classify early PD subjects (two evaluations over a 1-year follow-up) with respect to age-matched control subjects. Two functional tests were instrumented by a single accelerometer (quiet standing, Timed Up and Go test); satisfactory accuracies were obtained by using an ad hoc wrapper feature selection technique [413].…”