Dyskinesia Severity Estimation in Patients with Parkinson’s Disease Using Wearable Sensors and A Deep LSTM Network

Dyskinesias are abnormal involuntary movements that patients with mid-stage and advanced Parkinson’s disease (PD) may suffer from. These troublesome motor impairments are reduced by adjusting the dose or frequency of medication levodopa. However, to make a successful adjustment, the treating physician needs information about the severity rating of dyskinesia as patients experience in their natural living environment. In this work, we used movement data collected from the upper and lower extremities of PD patients along with a deep model based on Long Short-Term Memory to estimate the severity of dyskinesia. We trained and validated our model on a dataset of 14 PD subjects with dyskinesia. The subjects performed a variety of daily living activities while their dyskinesia severity was rated by a neurologist. The estimated dyskinesia severity ratings from our developed model highly correlated with the neurologist-rated dyskinesia scores (r=0.86 (p<0.001) and 1.77 MAE (6%)) indicating the potential of the developed the approach in providing the information required for effective medication adjustments for dyskinesia management.