The quantitative assessment of Parkinson’s disease (PD) is critical for guiding diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation. Conventional clinical evaluations—heavily dependent on manual rating scales such as the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS)—are time-consuming and prone to inter-rater variability. In this study, we propose a fully automated UPDRS gait-scoring framework. Our method combines (a) surface electromyography (EMG) signals and (b) inertial measurement unit (IMU) data into a single deep learning model. Our end-to-end network comprises three specialized branches—a diagnosis head, an evaluation head, and a balance head—whose outputs are integrated via a customized fusion-detection module to emulate the multidimensional assessments performed by clinicians. We validated our system on 21 PD patients and healthy controls performing a simple walking task while wearing a four-channel EMG array on the lower limbs and 2 shank-mounted IMUs. It achieved a mean classification accuracy of 92.8% across UPDRS levels 0–2. This approach requires minimal subject effort and sensor setup, significantly cutting clinician workload associated with traditional UPDRS evaluations while improving objectivity. The results demonstrate the potential of wearable sensor-driven deep learning methods to deliver rapid, reliable PD gait assessment in both clinical and home settings.
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is one of the fastest-growing neurodegenerative disorders; its cardinal motor signs—tremor, bradykinesia, and rigidity—substantially impair quality of life. Conventional clinician-rated scales can be subjective and exhibit limited interrater reliability, underscoring the need for objective and reliable quantification. We present an integrated evaluation framework that leverages surface electromyography (sEMG) with multimodal sensing. For representation learning, we combine time–frequency descriptors with Mini-ROCKET features. Grading is performed by an sEMG-based Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) model (LDA-SV) that produces per-segment probabilities for ordinal scores (0–3) and aggregates them via soft voting to assign item-level ratings. Participants completed a standardized protocol spanning gait, seated rest, and upper-limb tasks (forearm pronation–supination, finger-to-nose, fist clench, and thumb–index pinch). Using the aforementioned dataset, we report task-wise performance with 95% confidence intervals and compare the proposed model against CNN, LSTM, and InceptionTime using McNemar tests and log-odds ratios. The results indicate that the proposed model outperforms the three baseline models overall. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed approach, suggesting a viable pathway for the objective quantification of PD motor symptoms and facilitating broader clinical adoption of sEMG in diagnosis and treatment.