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Session: Poster session II
Session starts: Thursday 24 January, 16:00

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Jamie Jansen (Radboud University Nijmegen)
Ying Wang ()
Mike Cohen ()
Jorik Nonnekes ()
Richard van Wezel (Donders Institute for Brain, Behavior and Cognition)

Abstract:
In Parkinson’s disease (PD) a poorly understood symptom is Freezing of Gait (FoG), which is defined as a brief, episodic absence or marked reduction of forward progression of the feet despite the intention to walk. This symptom affects many PD patients in daily-life by increasing anxiety, the risk of falling and the quality of life. Despite the fact that during a freezing episode the feet are felt to be ‘glued’ to the floor, it is not necessarily a frozen akinetic posture. Forces under the legs can change during FoG with temporal structure and organization (Hausdorff, Balash & Giladi, 2003). New insights and technological improvements might improve quality of life by prediction and detection of FoG. Current methods, such as cueing, are continuous and are thought to work even better when only activated on-demand. To explore this, an experiment was performed to acquire and implement EEG, ECG, motion sensor and foot switch data. Here, the goal was to provoke FoG by stepping movements in place in 15 PD patients (Hoehn and Yahr stage 2-4) with FoG during an “off” medication state. The movement-in-place tasks were composed of 3 conditions: stepping in place, a normal 180-degree turn and a rapid turn. In this particular part of the study, analysis of the foot switch data is performed. In the experiment, four foot switches were attached to four locations under both feet and activation was measured over time. Analysis of foot switch data and an algorithm that detects and FoG will be presented.