A comparison of an implanted accelerometer with a wearable accelerometer for closed-loop DBS

Sensing technology, as well as cloud communication, is enabling the development of closed-loop deep brain stimulation (DBS) for Parkinson's disease. The accelerometer is a practical sensor that can provide information about the disease/health state of the patient as well as physical activity levels, all of which in the long-term can provide feedback information to an adaptive closed-loop control algorithm for more effective and personalized DBS therapy. In this paper, we present for the first time, acceleration streamed from Medtronic's RC+S device in patients with Parkinson's disease while at home, and compare it to accel-eration acquired concurrently from the patient's Apple Watch. We examined correlation between the accelerometer signals at varying time scales. We also compared the spectral band power obtained from the two accelerometers. While there was an average correlation of 0.37 for subject 1 and 0.50 for subject 2 between the two acceleration signals on a time scale of 10 minutes, the correlation was lower for shorter time scales on the order of seconds. There was greater spectral power in the Parkinsonian tremor band of 4–7 Hz for the externally worn accelerometer than the internal accelerometer, but the internal accelerometer showed greater relative power distributed in the higher frequencies (7–30 Hz). Thus, based on this preliminary analysis, we expect that the internal accelerometer may be used to assess patient activity and state for closed loop DBS but tremor detection may require more sophisticated signal processing. Furthermore, the internal accelerometer may contain information in higher frequency bands that reveal information about the patient state. Clinical relevance – Closed-loop DBS is expected to improve patient outcomes for the tens of thousands of Parkinson's disease patients using DBS [1], [2]. Eliminating an additional external device in order to implement closed-loop adaptive deep brain stimulation would benefit DBS patients however an understanding of what information is lost by doing so is needed to justify the ultimate design of closed-loop DBS.