Gait Detection from a Wrist-Worn Sensor Using Machine Learning Methods: A Daily Living Study in Older Adults and People with Parkinson’s Disease

Yonatan E. Brand, Dafna Schwartz, Eran Gazit, Aron S. Buchman, Ran Gilad-Bachrach, Jeffrey M. Hausdorff*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

11 Scopus citations

Abstract

Remote assessment of the gait of older adults (OAs) during daily living using wrist-worn sensors has the potential to augment clinical care and mobility research. However, hand movements can degrade gait detection from wrist-sensor recordings. To address this challenge, we developed an anomaly detection algorithm and compared its performance to four previously published gait detection algorithms. Multiday accelerometer recordings from a wrist-worn and lower-back sensor (i.e., the “gold-standard” reference) were obtained in 30 OAs, 60% with Parkinson’s disease (PD). The area under the receiver operator curve (AUC) and the area under the precision–recall curve (AUPRC) were used to evaluate the performance of the algorithms. The anomaly detection algorithm obtained AUCs of 0.80 and 0.74 for OAs and PD, respectively, but AUPRCs of 0.23 and 0.31 for OAs and PD, respectively. The best performing detection algorithm, a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN), exhibited high AUCs (i.e., 0.94 for OAs and 0.89 for PD) but lower AUPRCs (i.e., 0.66 for OAs and 0.60 for PD), indicating trade-offs between precision and recall. When choosing a classification threshold of 0.9 (i.e., opting for high precision) for the DCNN algorithm, strong correlations (r > 0.8) were observed between daily living walking time estimates based on the lower-back (reference) sensor and the wrist sensor. Further, gait quality measures were significantly different in OAs and PD compared to healthy adults. These results demonstrate that daily living gait can be quantified using a wrist-worn sensor.

Original languageEnglish
Article number7094
JournalSensors
Volume22
Issue number18
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 2022

Funding

FundersFunder number
Israel Innovation Authority
National Institutes of HealthR01AG056352
National Institute on AgingR01AG017917
Horizon 2020 Framework Programme
European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations
Tel Aviv University
Innovative Medicines Initiative820820

    Keywords

    • Parkinson’s disease
    • accelerometer
    • gait
    • inertial measurement unit (IMU)
    • machine learning
    • wrist

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Gait Detection from a Wrist-Worn Sensor Using Machine Learning Methods: A Daily Living Study in Older Adults and People with Parkinson’s Disease'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this