Long-term monitoring of gait in Parkinson's disease
Received 4 May 2006; received in revised form 21 July 2006; accepted 8 September 2006. published online 17 October 2006.
Abstract
A new system for long-term monitoring of gait in Parkinson's disease (PD) has been developed and validated. The characteristics of every stride taken over 10-h epochs were acquired using a lightweight ankle-mounted sensor array that transmitted data wirelessly to a small pocket PC at a rate of 100Hz. Stride was calculated from the vertical linear acceleration and pitch angular velocity of the leg with an accuracy of 5cm. Results from PD patients (5) demonstrate the effectiveness of long-term monitoring of gait in a natural environment. The small, variable stride length characteristic of Parkinsonian gait, and fluctuations of efficacy associated with levodopa therapy, such as delayed onset, wearing off, and the ‘off/on’ effect, could reliably be detected from long-term changes in stride length.
aDepartment of Neurology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY 10029, USA
bBobby R. Alford Department of Otolaryngology—Head and Neck Surgery, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA
cDepartment of Neurology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA
Corresponding author at: Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Department of Neurology, Box 1135, 1 E 100th Street, New York, NY 10029, USA. Tel.: +1 212 241 9306; fax: +1 212 831 1610.
ABSTRACT