Limb and trunk accelerometer data collected with wearable sensors from subjects with Parkinson's disease

Abstract

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by motor and non-motor symptoms. Dyskinesia and motor fluctuations are complications of PD medications. An objective measure of on/off time with/without dyskinesia has been sought for some time because it would facilitate the titration of medications. The objective of the dataset herein presented is to assess if wearable sensor data can be used to generate accurate estimates of limb-specific symptom severity. Nineteen subjects with PD experiencing motor fluctuations were asked to wear a total of five wearable sensors on both forearms and shanks, as well as on the lower back. Accelerometer data was collected for four days, including two laboratory visits lasting 3 to 4 hours each while the remainder of the time was spent at home and in the community. During the laboratory visits, subjects performed a battery of motor tasks while clinicians rated limb-specific symptom severity. At home, subjects were instructed to use a smartphone app that guided the periodic performance of a set of motor tasks.

Fig. 1

Flow diagram of participant onboarding in the study. The data from one subject was excluded from the dataset because he performed tasks that were slightly different from all other subjects. The data from another subject was excluded because a technical malfunction of the sensors led to a significant amount of data being lost.

Fig. 2

Overview of the Study Protocol. Study participants wore five Shimmer 3 sensors (reference axes are shown by the blue arrows in the inset) over four consecutive days. During Days 1 and 4 - when we recorded data in the laboratory - subjects were asked to performed part III of the MDS-UPDRS followed by a battery of tasks that were repeated 6 times. The * symbol represents the performance of the MDS-UPDRS. During Days 2 and 3 - when we recorded data in the home and community settings - subjects were asked to perform 7 times a short battery of tasks.

Fig. 3

Example of accelerometer collected data during the performance of the alternate hand movement task. In this example, the subject performed the task with the left arm while all other limbs were at rest. Each of the sub-plots illustrates the axis-specific acceleration data (blue – x-axis; orange – y-axis; and yellow – z-axis). Note that the data is provided in a local coordinate frame.

Fig. 4

Pie chart representation of the distribution of the clinical scores assigned to the motor tasks performed during the laboratory visits for: (a) tremor, (b) dyskinesia, and (c) bradykinesia.