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The Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) is used to recognize patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and rate its severity. The rating is crucial for disease progression monitoring and treatment adjustment. This study aims to advance the capabilities of PD management by developing an innovative framework that integrates deep learning with wearable sensor technology to enhance the precision of UPDRS assessments. We introduce a series of deep learning models to estimate UPDRS Part III scores, utilizing motion data from wearable sensors. Our approach leverages a novel Multi-shared-task Self-supervised Convolutional Neural Network–Long Short-Term Memory (CNN-LSTM) framework that processes raw gyroscope signals and their spectrogram representations. This technique aims to refine the estimation accuracy of PD severity during naturalistic human activities. Utilizing 526 min of data from 24 PD patients engaged in everyday activities, our methodology demonstrates a strong correlation of 0.89 between estimated and clinically assessed UPDRS-III scores. This model outperforms the benchmark set by single and multichannel CNN, LSTM, and CNN-LSTM models and establishes a new standard in UPDRS-III score estimation for free-body movements compared to recent state-of-the-art methods. These results signify a substantial step forward in bioengineering applications for PD monitoring, providing a robust framework for reliable and continuous assessment of PD symptoms in daily living settings. 

Abstract Background Unified Parkinson Disease Rating Scale-part III (UPDRS III) is part of the standard clinical examination performed to track the severity of Parkinson’s disease (PD) motor complications. Wearable technologies could be used to reduce the need for on-site clinical examinations of people with Parkinson’s disease (PwP) and provide a reliable and continuous estimation of the severity of PD at home. The reported estimation can be used to successfully adjust the dose and interval of PD medications. Methods We developed a novel algorithm for unobtrusive and continuous UPDRS-III estimation at home using two wearable inertial sensors mounted on the wrist and ankle. We used the ensemble of three deep-learning models to detect UPDRS-III-related patterns from a combination of hand-crafted features, raw temporal signals, and their time–frequency representation. Specifically, we used a dual-channel, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) for hand-crafted features, 1D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-LSTM for raw signals, and 2D CNN-LSTM for time–frequency data. We utilized transfer learning from activity recognition data and proposed a two-stage training for the CNN-LSTM networks to cope with the limited amount of data. Results The algorithm was evaluated on gyroscope data from 24 PwP as they performed different daily living activities. The estimated UPDRS-III scores had a correlation of $$0.79\, (\textit{p}<0.0001)$$ 0.79 ( p < 0.0001 ) and a mean absolute error of 5.95 with the clinical examination scores without requiring the patients to perform any specific tasks. Conclusion Our analysis demonstrates the potential of our algorithm for estimating PD severity scores unobtrusively at home. Such an algorithm could provide the required motor-complication measurements without unnecessary clinical visits and help the treating physician provide effective management of the disease. 

Abstract Levodopa-induced dyskinesias are abnormal involuntary movements experienced by the majority of persons with Parkinson’s disease (PwP) at some point over the course of the disease. Choreiform as the most common phenomenology of levodopa-induced dyskinesias can be managed by adjusting the dose/frequency of PD medication(s) based on a PwP’s motor fluctuations over a typical day. We developed a sensor-based assessment system to provide such information. We used movement data collected from the upper and lower extremities of 15 PwPs along with a deep recurrent model to estimate dyskinesia severity as they perform different activities of daily living (ADL). Subjects performed a variety of ADLs during a 4-h period while their dyskinesia severity was rated by the movement disorder experts. The estimated dyskinesia severity scores from our model correlated highly with the expert-rated scores ( r = 0.87 ( p < 0.001)), which was higher than the performance of linear regression that is commonly used for dyskinesia estimation ( r = 0.81 ( p < 0.001)). Our model provided consistent performance at different ADLs with minimum r = 0.70 (during walking) to maximum r = 0.84 (drinking) in comparison to linear regression with r = 0.00 (walking) to r = 0.76 (cutting food). These findings suggest that when our model is applied to at-home sensor data, it can provide an accurate picture of changes of dyskinesia severity facilitating effective medication adjustments.