Deep Echo State Networks for Diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease

In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease (PD) based on deep Echo State Networks (ESNs). The identification of PD is performed by analyzing the whole time-series collected from a tablet device during the sketching of spiral tests, without the need for feature extraction and data preprocessing. We evaluated the proposed approach on a public dataset of spiral tests. The results of experimental analysis show that DeepESNs perform significantly better than shallow ESN model. Overall, the proposed approach obtains state-of-the-art results in the identification of PD on this kind of temporal data.Comment: This is a pre-print of the paper submitted to the European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks, Computational Intelligence and Machine Learning, ESANN 201

Kinect-based Solution for the Home Monitoring of Gait and Balance in Elderly People with and without Neurological Diseases

Alterations of gait and balance are a significant cause of falls, injuries, and consequent hospitalizations in the elderly. In addition to age-associated motor decline, other factors can impact gait and stability, including the motor dysfunctions caused by neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s disease or hemiplegia after stroke. Monitoring changes and deterioration in gait patterns and balance is crucial for activating rehabilitation treatments and preventing serious consequences. This work presents a Kinect-based solution, suitable for domestic contexts, for assessing gait and balance in individuals at risk of falling. The system captures body movements during home acquisition sessions scheduled by clinicians at definite times of the day and automatically estimates specific functional parameters to objectively characterize the subjects’ performance. The system includes a graphical user interface designed to ensure usability in unsupervised contexts: the human-computer interaction mainly relies on natural body movements to support the self-management of the system, if the motor conditions allow it. This work presents the system’s features and facilities, and the preliminary results on healthy volunteers’ trials

Concentric ESN: Assessing the Effect of Modularity in Cycle Reservoirs

The paper introduces concentric Echo State Network, an approach to design reservoir topologies that tries to bridge the gap between deterministically constructed simple cycle models and deep reservoir computing approaches. We show how to modularize the reservoir into simple unidirectional and concentric cycles with pairwise bidirectional jump connections between adjacent loops. We provide a preliminary experimental assessment showing how concentric reservoirs yield to superior predictive accuracy and memory capacity with respect to single cycle reservoirs and deep reservoir models

A learning system for automatic Berg Balance Scale score estimation

The objective of this work is the development of a learning system for the automatic assessment of balance abilities in elderly people. The system is based on estimating the Berg Balance Scale (BBS) score from the stream of sensor data gathered by a Wii Balance Board. The scientific challenge tackled by our investigation is to assess the feasibility of exploiting the richness of the temporal signals gathered by the balance board for inferring the complete BBS score based on data from a single BBS exercise. The relation between the data collected by the balance board and the BBS score is inferred by neural networks for temporal data, modeled in particular as Echo State Networks within the Reservoir Computing (RC) paradigm, as a result of a comprehensive comparison among different learning models. The proposed system results to be able to estimate the complete BBS score directly from temporal data on exercise #10 of the BBS test, with â\u89\u8810 s of duration. Experimental results on real-world data show an absolute error below 4 BBS score points (i.e. below the 7% of the whole BBS range), resulting in a favorable trade-off between predictive performance and user's required time with respect to previous works in literature. Results achieved by RC models compare well also with respect to different related learning models. Overall, the proposed system puts forward as an effective tool for an accurate automated assessment of balance abilities in the elderly and it is characterized by being unobtrusive, easy to use and suitable for autonomous usage