Learning motor control parameters for motion strategy analysis of Parkinson's disease patients

Although the neurological impairments of Parkinson's disease (PD) patients are well known to go along with motor control deficits, e.g., tremor, rigidity, and reduced movement, not much is known about the motor control parameters affected by the disease. In this paper, we therefore present a novel approach to human motions analysis using motor control strategies with joint weight parameterization. We record the motions of healthy subjects and PD patients performing a hand coordination task with the whole-body XSens MVN motion capture system. For our motion strategy analysis we then follow a two step approach. First, we perform a complexity reduction by mapping the recorded human motions to a simplified kinematic model of the upper body. Second, we reproduce the recorded motions using a Jacobian weighted damped least squares controller with adaptive joint weights. We developed a method to iteratively learn the joint weights of the controller with the mapped human joint trajectories as reference input. Finally, we use the learned joint weights for a quantitative comparison between the motion control strategies of healthy subjects and PD patients. Other than expected from clinical experience, we found that the joint weights are almost evenly distributed along the arm in the PD group. In contrast to that, the proximal joint weights of the healthy subjects are notably larger than the distal ones.