Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale Rest Tremor Score Estimation Using the Fundamental Frequency

Beatriz Ferreira, Virginie Felizardo, Nuno Cruz Garcia, Mehran Pourvahab, Henriques Zacarias, Leonice Souza-Pereira, Nuno M. Garcia

Abstract: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a chronic, progressive and neurodegenerative disease that affects more than 10 million people worldwide. One of the cardinal symptoms of this disease is tremor, which is characterized as an involuntary, oscillatory movement of a body part. The tremor associated with PD can be divided into rest tremor, postural tremor, and kinetic tremor and is characterized as a regular and asymmetric tremor. Emerging methods involve the use of data from inertial sensors to measure, analyze and quantify tremor and other symptoms of PD. In this publication, a method for the monitoring of rest tremor scores is explored. This method is based on the number of windows in a signal with a fundamental frequency within the rest tremor frequency band and has potential to be applied as a support for monitoring this symptom. This method had a 87.88% success rate for predicting rest tremor scores on the X axis of a 4 hour accelerometer signal, establishing promising results that will b