Gielen, ‘‘Automatic assessment of levodopa-induced dyskinesias in daily life by neural networks

Abstract: We developed an objective and automatic procedure to assess the severity of levodopa-induced dyskinesia (LID) in patients with Parkinson’s disease during daily life activities. Thirteen patients were continuously monitored in a home-like situation for a period of approximately 2.5 hours. During this time period, the patients performed approximately 35 func-tional daily life activities. Behavior of the patients was mea-sured using triaxial accelerometers, which were placed at six different positions on the body. A neural network was trained to assess the severity of LID using various variables of the accelerometer signals. Neural network scores were compared with the assessment by physicians, who evaluated the contin-uously videotaped behavior of the patients off-line. The neural network correctly classified dyskinesia or the absence of dys-kinesia in 15-minute intervals in 93.7, 99.7, and 97.0 % for th