The Motor Function Evaluation System Design For Parkinson's Patients

Parkinson is one of the high incidence disease in the elderly population. With the intensification of the aging population in China, more and more elderly people is suffering from Parkinson. The main symptoms of Parkinson is motor dysfunction which causes great inconvenience and pain to the patient's life. However, because of the insufficient of the existing diagnostic methods, Parkinson cannot be detected early, resulting in as high as 60% of the delayed treatment. Presently, volume table method is clinically used to assess the motor function of the Parkinson patients while it has many disadvantages:(1) It is subjective because the diagnosis is determined only by observing the corresponding action of the patients through the clinicians'naked eyes. (2) It is inefficiency since each assessment requires many repeating operations according to the indexes in the volume table, which is tedious and time-consuming. (3) It is not accurate. The method is mainly used for the patients who have an obvious dyskinesia in the middle and later periods, because it is difficult to catch subtle movement signals in the early period. Therefore, this paper proposes a human motion signal acquisition system based on inertial sensors and wireless communication network to make up the insufficient of the volume table method.A body motion signal acquisition system constituted of multiple terminal nodes and one gateway node, is designed in this paper. Terminal nodes worn in certain parts of the body, are used to acquire the motion data of corresponding parts. In experiments, each node is highly synchronized in data transfer, and responsible for unloading the acquired data to gateway node sequentially in a wireless way. The gateway node is connected with the host computer (such as PC) through USB port, governing the wireless network construction of whole system and the command data forwarding of host computer. Finally, the host computer can control terminal nodes to perform corresponding actions by sending commands such as start, end, upload, erase and so on. This system is featured by wearable design, friendly user interface, and also the simple structure. Additionally, this article investigates the wireless charging solutions of this system and formulate a veneer wireless charging scheme, thus further enhancing the convenience in system using.With a stable and reliable system, some special experimental paradigm motions are developed for Parkinson patients after communication with clinicians in Nanjing Brain Hospital. And a number of clinical data acquisition experiments have been performed, to prove that the system has high stability and can meet the needs of clinical data acquisition. This system can further be applied to athletes'training assessment, stroke patients' motion function assessment and other body motion function assessments, with a high practical value.