Parkinson's Disease Tremor Detection in the Wild Using Wearable Accelerometers.

Continuous in-home monitoring of Parkinson's Disease (PD) symptoms might allow improvements in assessment of disease progression and treatment effects. As a first step towards this goal, we evaluate the feasibility of a wrist-worn wearable accelerometer system to detect PD tremor in the wild (uncontrolled scenarios). We evaluate the performance of several feature sets and classification algorithms for robust PD tremor detection in laboratory and wild settings. We report results for both laboratory data with accurate labels and wild data with weak labels. The best performance was obtained using a combination of a pre-processing module to extract information from the tremor spectrum (based on non-negative factorization) and a deep neural network for learning relevant features and detecting tremor segments. We show how the proposed method is able to predict patient self-report measures, and we propose a new metric for monitoring PD tremor (i.e., percentage of tremor over long periods of time), which may be easier to estimate the start and end time points of each tremor event while still providing clinically useful information.

Weakly-supervised learning for Parkinson's Disease tremor detection.

Continuous, automated monitoring of Parkinsons Disease (PD) symptoms would provide clinicians with more information to understand their patients' disease progression and adjust treatment protocols, thereby improving PD care. Collecting precisely labeled data for Parkinson's symptoms, such as tremor, is difficult. Therefore, algorithms for monitoring should only require weakly-labeled training data. In this paper, we evaluate five standard weakly-supervised algorithms and propose a "stratified" version of three of the algorithms, which take advantage of knowing the approximate amount of tremor within each segment. In particular, we analyze PD tremor detection performance as training segments increase in length from 30 seconds to 10 minutes, and labels thereby become less precise. As segment length increases to 10 minutes, standard algorithms are not able to discriminate tremor from non-tremor. However, our stratified algorithms, which can make use of more nuanced labels, show little decrease in performance as segment length increases.