Using Inertial Sensors to Automatically Detect and Segment Activities of Daily Living in People With Parkinson’s Disease

Wearable sensors such as inertial measurement units (IMUs) have been widely used to measure the quantity of physical activities during daily living in healthy and people with movement disorders through activity classification. These sensors have the potential to provide valuable information to evaluate the quality of the movement during the activities of daily living (ADL), such as walking, sitting down, and standing up, which could help clinicians to monitor rehabilitation and pharmaceutical interventions. However, high accuracy in the detection and segmentation of these activities is necessary for proper evaluation of the quality of the performance within a given segment. This paper presents algorithms to process IMU data, to detect and segment unstructured ADL in people with Parkinson’s disease (PD) in simulated free-living environment. The proposed method enabled the detection of 1610 events of ADL performed by nine community dwelling older adults with PD under simulated free-living environment with 90% accuracy (sensitivity = 90.8%, specificity = 97.8%) while segmenting these activities within 350 ms of the “gold-standard” manual segmentation. These results demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method to eventually be used to automatically detect and segment ADL in free-living environment in people with PD. This could potentially lead to a more expeditious evaluation of the quality of the movement and administration of proper corrective care for patients who are under physical rehabilitation and pharmaceutical intervention for movement disorders.