Gait-Guard: Turn-aware Freezing of Gait Detection for Non-intrusive Intervention Systems

Freezing of gait significantly reduces the quality of life for Parkinson's disease patients by increasing the risk of injurious falls and reducing mobility. Real-time intervention mechanisms promise relief from these symptoms, but require accurate real-time, portable freezing of gait detection systems to be effective. Current real-time detection systems have unacceptable false positive freezing of gait identification rates to be adopted by the patients for real-world use. To rectify this, we propose Gait-Guard, a closed-loop, real-time, and portable freezing of gait detection and intervention system that treats symptoms in real-time with a low false positive rate. We collected 1591 freezing of gait events across 26 patients to evaluate Gait-Guard. Gait-Guard achieved a 112% reduction in the false positive intervention rate when compared with other validated real-time freezing of gait detection systems, and detected 96.5% of the true positives with an average intervention latency of just 378.5ms in a subject-independent study, making Gait-Guard a practical system for patients to use in their daily lives.