A Vision-Based System for Stage Classification of Parkinsonian Gait Using Machine Learning and Synthetic Data

Parkinson’s disease is characterized by abnormal gait, which worsens as the condition progresses. Although several methods have been able to classify this feature through pose-estimation algorithms and machine-learning classifiers, few studies have been able to analyze its progression to perform stage classification of the disease. Moreover, despite the increasing popularity of these systems for gait analysis, the amount of available gait-related data can often be limited, thereby, hindering the progress of the implementation of this technology in the medical field. As such, creating a quantitative prognosis method that can identify the severity levels of a Parkinsonian gait with little data could help facilitate the study of the Parkinsonian gait for rehabilitation. In this contribution, we propose a vision-based system to analyze the Parkinsonian gait at various stages using linear interpolation of Parkinsonian gait models. We present a comparison between the performance of a k-nearest neighbors algorithm (KNN), support-vector machine (SVM) and gradient boosting (GB) algorithms in classifying well-established gait features. Our results show that the proposed system achieved 96–99% accuracy in evaluating the prognosis of Parkinsonian gaits.