Analysis and Classification of Motor Dysfunctions in Arm Swing in Parkinson’s Disease

Due to increasing life expectancy, the number of age-related diseases with motor dysfunctions (MD) such as Parkinson’s disease (PD) is also increasing. The assessment of MD is visual and therefore subjective. For this reason, many researchers are working on an objective evaluation. Most of the research on gait analysis deals with the analysis of leg movement. The analysis of arm movement is also important for the assessment of gait disorders. This work deals with the analysis of the arm swing by using wearable inertial sensors. A total of 250 records of 39 different subjects were used for this task. Fifteen subjects of this group had motor dysfunctions (MD). The subjects had to perform the standardized Timed Up and Go (TUG) test to ensure that the recordings were comparable. The data were classified by using the wavelet transformation, a convolutional neural network (CNN), and weight voting. During the classification, single signals, as well as signal combinations were observed. We were able to detect MD with an accuracy of 93.4% by using the wavelet transformation and a three-layer CNN architecture.