A technological review of wearable cueing devices addressing freezing of gait in Parkinson’s disease

Freezing of gait is one of the most debilitating symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and is an important contributor to falls, leading to it being a major cause of hospitalization and nursing home admissions. When the management of freezing episodes cannot be achieved through medication or surgery, non-pharmacological methods such as cueing have received attention in recent years. Novel cueing systems were developed over the last decade and have been evaluated predominantly in laboratory settings. However, to provide benefit to people with Parkinson’s and improve their quality of life, these systems must have the potential to be used at home as a self-administer intervention. This paper aims to provide a technological review of the literature related to wearable cueing systems and it focuses on current auditory, visual and somatosensory cueing systems, which may provide a suitable intervention for use in home-based environments. The paper describes the technical operation and effectiveness of the different cueing systems in overcoming freezing of gait. The “What Works Clearinghouse (WWC)” tool was used to assess the quality of each study described. The paper findings should prove instructive for further researchers looking to enhance the effectiveness of future cueing systems

Endoplasmic reticulum stress‑regulated chaperones as a serum biomarker panel for Parkinson’s disease

Examination of post-mortem brain tissues has previously revealed a strong association between Parkinson’s disease (PD) pathophysiology and endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress. Evidence in the literature regarding the circulation of ER stress-regulated factors released from neurons provides a rationale for investigating ER stress biomarkers in the blood to aid diagnosis of PD. The levels of ER stress-regulated proteins in serum collected from 29 PD patients and 24 non-PD controls were measured using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays. A panel of four biomarkers, protein disulfde-isomerase A1, protein disulfde-isomerase A3, mesencephalic astrocyte-derived neurotrophic factor, and clusterin, together with age and gender had higher ability (area under the curve 0.64, sensitivity 66%, specifcity 57%) and net beneft to discriminate PD patients from the non-PD group compared with other analyzed models. Addition of oligomeric and total α-synuclein to the model did not improve the diagnostic power of the biomarker panel. We provide evidence that ER stress-regulated proteins merit further investigation for their potential as diagnostic biomarkers of PD.</p

Methods description.

<p>Methods description.</p

Summary of published works regarding FoG detection algorithms.

<p>Summary of published works regarding FoG detection algorithms.</p

Evaluation method for FoG algorithms.

<p>Evaluation method for FoG algorithms.</p

Clinical characteristics year 2013.

<p>Clinical characteristics year 2013.</p

Summary of literature regarding patients and sensor systems.

<p>Summary of literature regarding patients and sensor systems.</p

Example of training and evaluation data used in the personalised FoG model selection.

<p>Example of training and evaluation data used in the personalised FoG model selection.</p

Set of features employed as input vector for the SVM classifier.

<p>Set of features employed as input vector for the SVM classifier.</p

Results of the proposed SVM-based approach for both generic and personalised models.

<p>Results of the proposed SVM-based approach for both generic and personalised models.</p