Selecting and evaluating key MDS-UPDRS activities using wearable devices for Parkinson’s disease self-assessment

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a complex neurodegenerative disease in the elderly. This disease has no cure, but assessing these motor symptoms will help slow down that progression. Inertial sensing-based wearable devices (ISWDs) such as mobile phones and smartwatches have been widely employed to analyse the condition of PD patients. However, most studies purely focused on a single activity or symptom, which may ignore the correlation between activities and complementary characteristics. In this paper, a novel technical pipeline is proposed for finegrained classification of PD severity grades, which identify the most representative activities. We also propose a multiactivities combination scheme based on MDS-UPDRS. Utilizing this scheme, symptom-related and complementary activities are captured. We collected 85 PD subjects of different severity grades using a single wrist sensor. Our best results demonstrate F1 scores of 95.75% for PD diagnosis and the fine-grained classification accuracy of PD disease grade is 82.41% when combing 4 activities which improved by 11.02% over a single activity. The experiments and theoretical analyses can serve as a useful foundation for future investigations into the effect of proposed solutions for PD diagnosis in uncontrolled environment setup, ultimately leading to self-PD assessment in the home environment.