A novel wearable laser device to regulate stride length in Parkinson's disease

Laser-light cueing shoes with integrated foot pressure and inertial sensing for investigating the impact of visual cueing on gait characteristics in Parkinson's disease individuals

Gait disorders are a fundamental challenge in Parkinson's disease (PD). The use of laser-light visual cues emitted from shoes has demonstrated effective in improving freezing of gait within less restrictive environments. However, the effectiveness of shoes-based laser-light cueing may vary among individuals with PD who have different types of impairments. We introduced an innovative laser-light visual shoes system capable of producing alternating visual cues for the left and right feet through one-side cueing at a time, while simultaneously recording foot inertial data and foot pressures. The effects of this visual cueing system on gait patterns were assessed in individuals with PD, both those with well-gait and those with worse-gait. Our device successfully quantified gait characteristics, including the asymmetry in the center of pressure trajectory, in individuals with PD. Furthermore, visual cueing prolonged stride times and increased the percentage of stance phase, while concurrently reducing stride length in PD individuals with well-gait. Conversely, in PD individuals with worse-gait, visual cueing resulted in a decreased freeze index and a reduction in the proportion of intervals prone to freezing episodes. The effects of visual cueing varied between PD individuals with well-gait and those with worse-gait. Visual cueing slowed down gait in the well-gait group while it appeared to mitigate freezing episodes in worse-gait group. Future researches, including enhancements to extend the projection distance of visual cues and clinical assessments conducted in real-world settings, will help establish the clinical utility of our proposed visual cueing system.

Using Kinect v2 to Control a Laser Visual Cue System to Improve the Mobility during Freezing of Gait in Parkinson's Disease

Different auditory and visual cues have been proven to be very effective in improving the mobility of people with Parkinson's (PwP). Nonetheless, many of the available methods require user intervention and so on to activate the cues. Moreover, once activated, these systems would provide cues continuously regardless of the patient's needs. This research proposes a new indoor method for casting dynamic/automatic visual cues for PwP based on their head direction and location in a room. The proposed system controls the behavior of a set of pan/tilt servo motors and laser pointers, based on the real-time skeletal information acquired from a Kinect v2 sensor. This produces an automatically adjusting set of laser lines that can always be in front of the patient as a guideline for where the next footstep would be placed. A user interface was also created that enables users to control and adjust the settings based on the preferences. The aim of this research was to provide PwP with an unobtrusive/automatic indoor system for improving their mobility during a Freezing of gait (FOG) incident. The results showed the possibility of employing such system, which does not rely on the subject's input nor does it introduce any additional complexities to operate.