Ensemble deep model for continuous estimation of Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale III

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 [Formula: see text] 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. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12938-021-00872-w.