Detecting early-stage Parkinson's disease from gait data.

Parkinson's disease is a chronic and progressive neurodegenerative disorder with an estimated 10 million people worldwide living with PD. Since early signs are benign, many patients go undiagnosed until the symptoms get severe and the treatment becomes more difficult. The symptoms start intermittently and gradually become continuous as the disease progresses.

Predicting Early Stage Drug Induced Parkinsonism using Unsupervised and Supervised Machine Learning.

Drug Induced Parkinsonism (DIP) is the most common, debilitating movement disorder induced by antipsychotics. There is no tool available in clinical practice to effectively diagnose the symptoms at the onset of the disease. In this study, the variations in gait accelerometer data due to the intermittency of tremor at the initial stages is examined.

A lobster-inspired bending module for compliant robotic applications.

Ideally, robots may be designed to adapt to different tasks such as heavy lifting and handling delicate objects, in which the requirements in force compliance and position accuracy vary dramatically. While conventional rigid actuators are usually characterized by high precision and large force output, soft actuators are designed to be more compliant and flexible. In this paper, a lobster-inspired bending module with compliant actuation, enhanced torque output, and reconfigurability in assembling is presented.

Using accelerometer as a diagnostic tool to detect drug-induced parkinsonism (DIP) secondary to first-generation anti-psychotic medications.

Objective: The objective of this study is to examine the effectiveness of an accelerometer-based compact system in detecting and quantifying drug-induced parkinsonism (DIP) in patients with schizophrenia.

Method: A pilot study controlled clinical trial comprising 6 people with schizophrenia and 11 control subjects was conducted at Alfred Health, Melbourne. Participants had their movements assessed using Barnes Akathisia Rating Scale (BARS), Simpson Angus Scale (SAS) and Movement Disorder Society Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale Part III (MDS-UPDRS III) followed by an assessment of gait using three triaxial accelerometers.

An alignment maximization method for the kinematics of the eye and eye-head fixations.

The orientation of human eyes is uniquely defined with respect to their gaze direction, known as Donders' law. Further, the manner in which the eyes follow Donders' law varies as a function of the situation. When the head is stationary, the Donders' surfaces are flat planes but they tilt when eye fixation distance changes.