Understanding Walking in Parkinson's Disease with Wearable Sensors: IMU walking data

The goal of this project is to better understand walking and impaired walking (slow, shuffling or freezing of gait), in Parkinson's disease (PD) as it compares to that of age-matched healthy controls. We use data from wearable inertial measurement unit sensors (IMUs, made by APDM Inc.) to calculate gait parameters that characterize the dynamics of people walking in both a turning and barrier course designed to elicit freezing of gait (Syrkin-Nikolau et al., Neurobiology of disease, 2017 and O'Day et al., BioRxiv, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1101/671479) and over forty meters of straight forward walking, the clinical test of Parkinsonian gait. Inertial measurement unit sensors were applied laterally to both shanks for all subjects. Methods are extensively described in the above two references. The records in this database are from patients with Parkinson's disease who experience severe walking symptoms like freezing of gait (FOG), also identified as (freezers); as well as data from people with Parkinson's disease who do not experience FOG (non-freezers). All subjects are off dopaminergic medication or off subthalamic deep brain stimulation (DBS), if applicable, for the walking trials unless specified otherwise (there's a subset of the cohort that is on DBS for some trials, see more below). We also have a small cohort of age-matched healthy controls who do not have Parkinson's disease and who completed the walking tasks. There were 20 total subjects with Parkinson's disease that completed the walking tasks, but 11 of these subjects returned for a later research visit where they completed the same tasks (at least 1 year later). This makes a total of 31 records from subjects with Parkinson's disease and 9 records from age-matched healthy control subjects, for a total of 40 records.