Non-Invasive Medical Device For Parkinson's Patient With Episodes Of Freezing Of Gait

Abstract

Parkinson's disease is a progressive nervous system disorder that affects movement. It is a disease in which the neural pathways between your brain and foot muscles are no longer communicating effectively, causing problems such as shaking, stiffness, and Freezing of Gait (FOG). Our main concern is to overcome FOG. It is an abnormal gait pattern in which there are sudden, short, and temporary episodes of an inability to move the feet forward. In a sense, the patients get stuck. To overcome this problem, we introduced three cueing systems to our device named as a visual, auditory, and vibratory cueing system. These cueing system helps Parkinson's patients with episodes of FOG to walk smoothly when the condition occurs. FOG is detected by the change in frequency of body vibration. A normal person walks in a range of frequency of 3-4 Hz whereas during the condition, the patient starts to shiver and body vibrations increase to 5-8 Hz. We analyse the frequency by using Fourier Transform to compute the frequency ranges. The sensor is continuously sending data to the controller which calcu-lates frequency. If the frequency is between the threshold range, the system knows the condition has occurred and turns on the cueing systems. Users have the option to choose any or all of the cueing systems as per their desire. Once the frequency is in its optimal range, the cueing systems will turn off automatically.