Improved Deep Learning Technique to Detect Freezing of Gait in Parkinson’s Disease Based on Wearable Sensors

Freezing of gait (FOG) is a paroxysmal dyskinesia, which is common in patients with advanced Parkinson’s disease (PD). It is an important cause of falls in PD patients and is associated with serious disability. In this study, we implemented a novel FOG detection system using deep learning technology. The system takes multi-channel acceleration signals as input, uses one-dimensional deep convolutional neural network to automatically learn feature representations, and uses recurrent neural network to model the temporal dependencies between feature activations. In order to improve the detection performance, we introduced squeeze-and-excitation blocks and attention mechanism into the system, and used data augmentation to eliminate the impact of imbalanced datasets on model training. Experimental results show that, compared with the previous best results, the sensitivity and specificity obtained in 10-fold cross-validation evaluation were increased by 0.017 and 0.045, respectively, and the equal error rate obtained in leave-one-subject-out cross-validation evaluation was decreased by 1.9%. The time for detection of a 256 data segment is only 0.52 ms. These results indicate that the proposed system has high operating efficiency and excellent detection performance, and is expected to be applied to FOG detection to improve the automation of Parkinson’s disease diagnosis and treatment.