Automatic Assessing of Tremor Severity Using Nonlinear Dynamics, Artificial Neural Networks and Neuro-Fuzzy Classifier

Neurological diseases like Alzheimer, epilepsy, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis and other dementias influence the lives of patients, their families and society. Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease that occurs due to loss of dopamine, a neurotransmitter and slow destruction of neurons. Brain area affected by progressive destruction of neurons is responsible for controlling movements, and patients with PD reveal rigid and uncontrollable gestures, postural instability, small handwriting and tremor. Commercial activity-promoting gaming systems such as the Nintendo Wii and Xbox Kinect can be used as tools for tremor, gait or other biomedical signals acquisitions. They also can aid for rehabilitation in clinical settings. This paper emphasizes the use of intelligent optical sensors or accelerometers in biomedical signal acquisition, and of the specific nonlinear dynamics parameters or fuzzy logic in Parkinson's disease tremor analysis. Nowadays, there is no screening test for early detection of PD. So, we investigated a method to predict PD, based on the image processing of the handwriting belonging to a candidate of PD. For classification and discrimination between healthy people and PD people we used Artificial Neural Networks (Radial Basis Function - RBF and Multilayer Perceptron - MLP) and an Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Classifier (ANFC). In general, the results may be expressed as a prognostic (risk degree to contact PD)