Is the Assessment of 5 Meters of Gait with a Single Body-Fixed-Sensor Enough to Recognize Idiopathic Parkinson's Disease-Associated Gait?

Abstract

Quantitative assessment of gait in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) is an important step in addressing motor symptoms and improving clinical management. Based on the assessment of only 5 meters of gait with a single body-fixed-sensor placed on the lower back, this study presents a method for the identification of step-by-step kinematic parameters in 14 healthy controls and in 28 patients at early-to-moderate stages of idiopathic PD. Differences between groups in step-by-step kinematic parameters were evaluated to understand gait impairments in the PD group. Moreover, a discriminant model between groups was built from a subset of significant and independent parameters and based on a 10-fold cross-validated model. The discriminant model correctly classified a total of 89.5% participants with four kinematic parameters. The sensitivity of the model was 95.8% and the specificity 78.6%. The results indicate that the proposed method permitted to reasonably recognize idiopathic PD-associated gait from 5-m walking assessments. This motivates further investigation on the clinical utility of short episodes of gait assessment with body-fixed-sensors.