Self-Supervised Learning and Opportunistic Inference for Continuous Monitoring of Freezing of Gait in Parkinson's Disease
This work addresses the need for energy-efficient and minimally labeled in-home monitoring of motor symptoms in Parkinson's disease patients, representing an incremental improvement over existing technologies.
The paper tackled the problem of real-time Freezing of Gait detection in Parkinson's disease by proposing LIFT-PD, a self-supervised learning framework that achieved a 7.25% increase in precision and 4.4% improvement in accuracy compared to supervised models while using only 40% of labeled data.
Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive neurological disorder that impacts the quality of life significantly, making in-home monitoring of motor symptoms such as Freezing of Gait (FoG) critical. However, existing symptom monitoring technologies are power-hungry, rely on extensive amounts of labeled data, and operate in controlled settings. These shortcomings limit real-world deployment of the technology. This work presents LIFT-PD, a computationally-efficient self-supervised learning framework for real-time FoG detection. Our method combines self-supervised pre-training on unlabeled data with a novel differential hopping windowing technique to learn from limited labeled instances. An opportunistic model activation module further minimizes power consumption by selectively activating the deep learning module only during active periods. Extensive experimental results show that LIFT-PD achieves a 7.25% increase in precision and 4.4% improvement in accuracy compared to supervised models while using as low as 40% of the labeled training data used for supervised learning. Additionally, the model activation module reduces inference time by up to 67% compared to continuous inference. LIFT-PD paves the way for practical, energy-efficient, and unobtrusive in-home monitoring of PD patients with minimal labeling requirements.