Sensor Fusion for Identification of Freezing of Gait Episodes Using Wi-Fi and Radar Imaging

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive and neurodegenerative condition causing motor impairments. One of the major motor related impairments that present biggest challenge is freezing of gait (FOG) in Parkinson's patients. In FOG episode, the patient is unable to initiate, control or sustain a gait that consequently affects the Activities of Daily Livings (ADLs) and increases the occurrence of critical events such as falls. This paper presents continuous monitoring ADLs and classification freezing of gait episodes using Wi-Fi and radar imaging. The idea is to exploit the multi-resolution scalograms generated by channel state information (CSI) imprint and micro-Doppler signatures produced by reflected radar signal. A total of 120 volunteers took part in experimental campaign and were asked to perform different activities including walking fast, walking slow, voluntary stop, sitting down & stand up and freezing of gait. Two neural networks namely Autoencoder and a proposed enhanced Autoencoder were used classify ADLs and FOG episodes using data fusion process by combining the images acquired from both sensing techniques. The Autoencoder provided overall classification accuracy of ~87% for combined datasets. The proposed algorithm provided significantly better results by presenting an overall accuracy of ~98% using data fusion.