The Design of a Parkinson’s Tremor Predictor and Estimator Using a Hybrid Convolutional-Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network

Abstract

Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is considered to be the second most common age-related neuroegenerative disorder, and it is estimated that seven to ten million people worldwide have PD. One of the symptoms of PD is tremor, and studies have shown that wearable assistive devices have the potential to assist in suppressing it. However, despite the progress in the development of these devices, their performance is limited by the tremor estimators they use. Thus, a need for a tremor model that helps the wearable assistive devices to increase tremor suppression without impeding voluntary motion remains. In this work, a user-independent and task-independent tremor and voluntary motion detection method based on neural networks is proposed. Inertial measurement units (IMUs) were used to measure acceleration and angular velocity from participants with PD, these data were then used to train the neural network. The achieved estimation percentage accuracy of voluntary motion was 99.0%, and the future prediction percentage accuracy was 97.3%, 93.7%, 91.4% and 90.3% for 10 ms, 20 ms, 50 ms and 100 ms ahead, respectively. The root mean squared error (RMSE) achieved for tremor estimation was an average of 0.00087°/s on new unseen data, and the future prediction average RMSE across the different tasks achieved was 0.001°/s, 0.002°/s, 0.020°/s and 0.049°/s for 1 ms, 2 ms, 5 ms, and 10 ms ahead, respectively. Therefore, the proposed method shows promise for use in wearable suppression devices.