GaitAssist: A Daily-Life Support and Training System for Parkinson's Disease Patients with Freezing of Gait

摘要

Patients with Parkinson's disease often experience freezing of gait, which bears a high risk of falling, a prevalent cause for morbidity and mortality. In this work we present GaitAssist, a wearable system for freezing of gait support in daily life. The system provides real-time auditory cueing after the onset of freezing episodes. Furthermore, GaitAssist implements training exercises to learn how to handle freezing situations. GaitAssist is the result of a design process where we considered the input of engineers, clinicians and 18 Parkinson's disease patients, in order to find an optimal trade-off between system wearability and performance. We tested the final system in a user study with 5 additional patients. They reported a reduction in the freezing of gait duration as a result of the auditory stimulation provided, and that they feel the system enhanced their confidence during walking.