Evaluation of Parkinson's Disease Motor Symptoms via Wearable Inertial Measurements Units and Surface Electromyography Sensors.

Research overview

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Parkinson's disease (PD) is one of the fastest-growing neurodegenerative disorders; its cardinal motor signs-tremor, bradykinesia, and rigidity-substantially impair quality of life. Conventional clinician-rated scales can be subjective and exhibit limited interrater reliability, underscoring the need for objective and reliable quantification. We present an integrated evaluation framework that leverages surface electromyography (sEMG) with multimodal sensing. For representation learning, we combine time-frequency descriptors with Mini-ROCKET features. Grading is performed by an sEMG-based Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) model (LDA-SV) that produces per-segment probabilities for ordinal scores (0-3) and aggregates them via soft voting to assign item-level ratings. Participants completed a standardized protocol spanning gait, seated rest, and upper-limb tasks (forearm pronation-supination, finger-to-nose, fist clench, and thumb-index pinch). Using the aforementioned dataset, we report task-wise performance with 95% confidence intervals and compare the proposed model against CNN, LSTM, and InceptionTime using McNemar tests and log-odds ratios. The results indicate that the proposed model outperforms the three baseline models overall. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed approach, suggesting a viable pathway for the objective quantification of PD motor symptoms and facilitating broader clinical adoption of sEMG in diagnosis and treatment.

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