A Novel Framework for Physical Therapy Rehabilitation Monitoring and Assessment in Parkinson Disease Patients using Depth Information

Abstract

Parkinson Disease (PD) is a type of neurodegenerative disease mainly characterised by the progressive declination of motor and cognitive skills. Physical therapies have been shown to be helpful to mitigate the degenerative impact of PD patients by stimulating the patient to maintain activity. However, problems associated to these therapies such as subjective evaluations or lack of accessibility, rise some barriers to professionals and related stakeholders to reach fully functional integrated healthcare systems. In this paper, a novel framework to continuously monitor and assess PD patients in their therapies is presented. This framework is composed of a sensorial system that captures movement information from patients while they perform physical rehabilitation therapies and a tool for processing this information, extracting movement patterns and providing an objective evaluation of the performed exercises. The system has been deployed and tested in a real-world environment with PD patients at different stages of the disease. The evaluation of the system underlined the added value of objective data in measuring patient movement evolution and how this helps in personalizing treatment according to patients needs.