Smart Gait-Aid Glasses for Parkinson's Disease Patients

Daehan Ahn, Hyerim Chung, Ho Won Lee, Kyunghun Kang, Pan Woo Ko, Nam Sung Kim, Taejoon Park

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a chronic progressive disease caused by loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra, degenerating the nervous system of a patient over time. Freezing of gait (FOG), which is a form of akinesia, is a symptom of PD. Meanwhile, recent studies show that the gait of PD patients experiencing FOG can be significantly improved by providing the regular visual or auditory patterns for the patients. In this paper, we propose a gait-Aid system built upon smart glasses. Our system continuously monitors the gait and so on of a PD patient to detect FOG, and upon detection of FOG it projects visual patterns on the glasses as if the patterns were actually on the floor. Conducting experiments involving ten PD patients, we demonstrate that our system achieves the accuracy of 92.86\% in detecting FOG episodes and that it improves the gait speed and stride length of PD patients by 15.3 \sim 37.2% and 18.7 \sim 31.7%, respectively.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number7827083
Pages (from-to)2394-2402
Number of pages9
JournalIEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering
Volume64
Issue number10
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 2017

Keywords

  • Parkinson's disease
  • Wearable gait-Aid glasses
  • augmented reality
  • inertial sensors
  • wearable computing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Biomedical Engineering

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