Aim: This paper introduces Apkinson, a mobile application for motor evaluation and monitoring of Parkinson’s disease patients. Materials & methods: The App is based on previously reported methods, ...

(1) Background and objectives: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is one of the most prevalent neurodegenerative diseases whose typical symptoms include bradykinesia, abnormal gait and posture, shortened strides, and other movement disorders. In this study, we present a novel framework to evaluate PD gait patterns using state of the art deep learning algorithms. A comparative analysis with three different approaches is presented and evaluated upon three groups of subjects: PD patients, Young Healthy Controls (YHC), and Elderly Healthy Controls (EHC). (2) Methods: The three approaches used in the study include: (i) The energy content of the gait signals in the frequency domain is captured with spectrograms that are used to feed a CNN model, (ii) Temporal information is incorporated by creating GRU networks, (iii) Temporal and spectral information is simultaneously captured by creating a new architecture based on CNNs and GRUs. (3) Results: Accuracies of up to 83.7% and 92.7% are found for the classification between PD vs. EHC and PD vs. YHC, respectively. According to our observations, the proposed approach based on the combination of temporal and spectral information, yields better results than others reported in the state of the art. (4) Conclusions: The results obtained in this study suggest that the combination of temporal and spectral information is more accurate than individual approaches used to classify and evaluate gait patterns in PD patients. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study in gait analysis where temporal and spectral information is combined in an architecture of deep learning.

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neuro-degenerative disorder that produces motor and non-motor impairments. Non-motor impairments include communication and mood disorders. Most of the studies in the literature have been focused on the analysis of motor symptoms. However, non-motor signs are also present in most of the cases. This paper addresses the study of language production as a potential tool to diagnose and monitor the neurological state of PD patients. The study proposes the use of natural language processing methods to extract features from transcriptions obtained from spontaneous speech recordings to discriminate between healthy control people and PD patients. The analysis considered classical features such as Bag of Words and Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency, along with methods based on word-embeddings. Accuracies of up to 72% are obtained when discriminating between PD patients and healthy subjects, which confirms that there is information embedded in the language production that can be used for the assessment of the disease.