Radar-Based Tremor Quantification Using Deep Learning for Improved Parkinson’s and Palliative Care Assessment

Tremor is one of the most prevalent movement disorders, which is especially observed in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and other conditions common in palliative care (PC). Effective treatment and monitoring of disease progression are crucial in the context of PC for patients suffering from movement disorders. To this aim, accurate and continuous detection and assessment of tremor characteristics, such as the tremor frequency, is required. Current evaluations by clinicians conducted during sporadic consultations are subjective and intermittent. Radar sensors provide continuous, objective evaluations of tremor motion in patient monitoring, offering a contactless, light-independent, and privacy-preserving method that directly measures tremor’s radial motion through the Doppler effect. As previous radar-based research lacks continuous tremor monitoring in realistic scenarios, this study uses a frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar to detect subtle tremor motions and estimates their frequencies amid challenges such as large body motion interference in a clinical setting. Seventeen healthy participants were instructed to mimic tremors in their right hand while performing three diagnostics movements frequently used in tremor assessment, and two activities that were inspired by common daily tasks encountered in PC settings. Tremor detection and frequency estimation was enabled using suitable radar signal preprocessing followed by a neural network comprising convolutional and recurrent layers. Reference frequencies were obtained from an inertial measurement unit (IMU) attached to the participants’ right hands. Cross-validation revealed a mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.47 Hz in radar-based frequency estimation compared with the reference and a 90% accuracy in distinguishing the presence or absence of tremor, highlighting the proposed approach’s high potential for future tremor assessment.