A Study on the Essential and Parkinson’s Arm Tremor Classification †

Abstract

In this article, the challenge of discriminating between essential and Parkinson’s tremor is addressed. Although a variety of methods have been proposed for diagnosing the severity of these highly occurring tremor types, their rapid and effective identification, especially in their early stages, proves particularly difficult and complicated due to their wide range of causes and similarity of symptoms. To this goal, a clinical analysis was performed, where a number of volunteers including essential and Parkinson’s tremor-diagnosed patients underwent a series of pre-defined motion patterns, during which a wearable sensing setup was used to measure their lower arm tremor characteristics from multiple selected points. Extracted features from the acquired accelerometer signals were used to train classification algorithms, including decision trees, discriminant analysis, support vector machine (SVM), K-nearest neighbor (KNN) and ensemble learning algorithms, for providing a comparative study and evaluating the potential of utilizing machine learning to accurately discriminate among different tremor types. Overall, SVM related classifiers proved to be the most successful in terms of classifying between Parkinson’s, essential and no tremor diagnosed with percentages reaching up to 100% for a single accelerometer measurement at the metacarpal area. In general and in motion while holding an object position, Coarse Gaussian SVM classifier reached 82.62% accuracy.