Quantitative assessment of dance therapy influence on upper limb biomechanics for a people with Parkinson’s disease

Abstract

Parkinson's disease is one of the neurodegenerative disorders that affect peoples’ voluntary movements, and can be described by the motor symptoms. The most common PD motor symptoms are bradykinesia (slowness of movement), rigidity (stiffness in the limbs), tremor and shuffling gait [1]. Meanwhile PD almost for all patients is diagnosed in later stages of the disease, and the diagnosis is based on clinical symptoms. For PD diagnosis and evaluation of the severity Unified Parkinson’s disease rating scale (UPDRS) is used. For a quantitative assessment of the movements various motion capture techniques can be used. These techniques ranges from video cameras for measuring the gross motion of human body to application for tremor detection using single accelerometers [2]. During the last decade Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) became popular. IMU allows capturing the human movements and compare with the data of an image capture cameras. Researchers for detection of bradykinesia used IMU mounted on the wrist [3], others used two IMU, which were attached to the subject's upper arm and forearm [4]. Various physical rehabilitation programs are used to reduce certain motor symptoms for the patients with PD. Lately, more often for PD therapy are applied various dance therapy, such as Argentinean tango [5]. Experimental data from 20 participles was obtained in cooperation with the Vilnius University Hospital Santaros Klinikos neurology and rehabilitation, physical and sport centres. Total 20 subjects diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease were recruited for the study and were divided into two groups: PD and CO groups. During the motor tasks focused on the performance of upper limbs, the kinematics of the movement were recorded using wireless IMU sensors (Shimmer Research, Dublin, Ireland). In this study, we selected the elbow joint flexion – extension movement in the sagittal plane and for the quantitative assessment of the upper limb of 12 kinematic parameters were calculated. MATLAB software was used to process the raw measurement data and calculate the above mentioned metrics.