Alzheimer's disease classification based on gait information

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is becoming one of the major diseases of the elderly. Traditionally, patients take questionnaires or do some balance tests for clinical evaluation. However, results with such evaluation are subjective. For more objective quantitative measurement, this paper uses an inertial-sensor-based device to measure the gait information while participants walking. In the experiment, the participants are asked to walk on a 40m strike line and take single-task and dual-task tests. In the dual-task test, the participants are asked to count down from 100. This paper presents a stride detection algorithm to automatically acquire gait information of each gait cycle from the acceleration and angular velocity signals. Features are calculated from those inertial signals. After feature generation, we do feature selection to select the significant feature. Then, a probabilistic neural networks (PNNs) is used to classify if the participants suffer from AD. In this paper, we provide an objective way to evaluate the situation of the participants. The experimental results successfully validate the effectiveness of the proposed device and the proposed algorithm with an overall classification accuracy rates are 63.33% and 70.00% in women and men group, respectively.