Classification of Parkinson's disease and essential tremor based on gait and balance characteristics from wearable motion sensors: A data-driven approach

Parkinson's disease (PD) and essential tremor (ET) are movement disorders that can have similar clinical characteristics including tremor and gait difficulty. These disorders can be misdiagnosed leading to delay in appropriate treatment. The aim of the study was to determine whether gait and balance variables obtained with wearable sensors can be utilized to differentiate between PD and ET using machine learning techniques. Additionally, we compared classification performances of several machine learning models. A balance and gait data set collected from 567 people with PD or ET was investigated. Performance of several machine learning techniques including neural networks (NN), support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbor (kNN), decision tree (DT), random forest (RF), and gradient boosting (GB), were compared using F1-scores. Machine learning models classified PD and ET based on balance and gait characteristics better than chance or logistic regression. The highest F1-score was 0.61 of NN, followed by 0.59 of GB, 0.56 of RF, 0.55 of SVM, 0.53 of DT, and 0.49 of kNN. The results demonstrated the utility of machine learning models to classify different movement disorders. Further study will provide a more accurate clinical tool to help clinical decision-making.