Using Deep Learning for Task and Tremor Type Classification in People with Parkinson's Disease

Hand tremor is one of the dominating symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD), which significantly limits activities of daily living. Along with medications, wearable devices have been proposed to suppress tremor. However, suppressing tremor without interfering with voluntary motion remains challenging and improvements are needed. The main goal of this work was to design algorithms for the automatic identification of the tremor type and voluntary motions, using only surface electromyography (sEMG) data. Towards this goal, a bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) algorithm was implemented that uses sEMG data to identify the motion and tremor type of people living with PD when performing a task. Moreover, in order to automate the training process, hyperparamter selection was performed using a regularized evolutionary algorithm. The results show that the accuracy of task classification among 15 people living with PD was 84±8%, and the accuracy of tremor classification was 88±5%. Both models performed significantly above chance levels (20% and 33% for task and tremor classification, respectively). Thus, it was concluded that the trained models, based on using purely sEMG signals, could successfully identify the task and tremor types.