Gait and balance patterns related to Free-Walking and TUG tests in Parkinson’s Disease based on plantar pressure data

Continuous monitoring of patients with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is critical for their effective management, as early detection of improvement or degradation signs play an important role on pharmaceutical and/or interventional plans. Within this work, a group of seven PD patients and a group of ten controls performed a set of exercises related to the evaluation of PD gait. Plantar pressure signals were collected and used to derive a set of analytics. Statistical tests and feature selection approaches revealed that the spatial distribution of the Center of Pressure during a static balance exercise is the most discriminative analytic and may be used for every-day monitoring of the patients. Results have revealed that out of the 28 features extracted from the collected signals, 10 were statistically significant (p < 0.05) and can be used to machine learning algorithms and/or similar approaches.