Evaluation of functional movement parameters of Parkinson`s patients during ON and OFF states of dopaminergic medication

Year 2025, Volume: 4 Issue: 2, 84 - 93, 31.08.2025

İsmail Bayram

https://doi.org/10.55971/EJLS.1727347

Abstract

Parkinson's Disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disease affecting sensory-motor systems and decreasing patients' quality of life. This study aims to find a sophisticated method for detecting characteristics of patients and comparing gait, balance and tremors between the ON and OFF periods. The data provided by the Xsens (Movella) company belongs to 3 anonymous patients, and the content is unique for all 3 patients since they were unable to perform the same movement patterns due to different disease severity. Their descriptive information was not provided due to patient privacy. Tremor, gait and balance assessments were asked to be performed via preferred approaches and methods by using MVN Analyze Software. Kinematic improvements were detected in gait parameters such as cadence (step/min), the number of steps, speed (m/s), total distance (m), stride and length. The provided data shows that patients have some difficulties during turns and initiation of gait (freezing gait). It accompanies a delay in the first step at the beginning of the gait and after turns as well. For the tremor assessment, a heat map was generated based on the magnitude and frequency of the tremors. Both the magnitude and frequency of the tremors were smaller under the dopaminergic medication (ON: amplitude:4.99 cm frequency:4.04 Hz; OFF: amplitude:7.78 cm frequency:5.17 Hz). We were unable to assess the balance due to time limitations. Most of the parameters show an improvement in gait and tremors during the ON period. Results are important in terms of individualization of drug intake time and dosage.

Keywords

Drug therapy , inertial measurement units , motion analyses , Parkinson´s disease

Ethical Statement

Not applicable, because the data used in this article provided by the Xsens Company.

Supporting Institution

This study is partly funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) as part of Germany`s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2050/1 – Project ID 390696704 – Cluster of Excellence “Centre for Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop” (CeTI) of Technische Universität Dresden.

Thanks

This study has been orally presented at the 1st Movement & Training Sciences Congress held by Fenerbahçe University in İstanbul, TÜRKİYE. The author would like to express his sincere appreciation to the participants who volunteered for the study and Xsens Company for organizing this challenge. The author also extends his gratitude to Jonathan Lyon Jacob Lommen for his valuable support in the data analysis phase of the study, despite his decision not to be listed as a co-author due to his non-academic career interests.

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