Content area
Full Text
Received Mar 15, 2018; Revised May 4, 2018; Accepted May 9, 2018
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1. Introduction
Neurodegenerative diseases (NDDs) are the diseases of neuronal destruction in the central nervous system. The NDDs cause the volume of the brain and the amount of nerve deterioration over time. The diseases reduce the ability of patient and destroy tissue and nerves of the brain because nerves or neurons in the brain normally cannot reproduce themselves. Some neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease (PD), Huntington disease (HD), and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) usually occur at an older age and can lead to serious gait abnormalities [1]. Since balancing and sequencing of movement are controlled by the central nervous system, the gait of patient with neurodegenerative disorders will become abnormal. The main symptoms of PD are legs trembling, slowed moving, and impaired posture and balance. It may grow worse over time [2]. The main symptoms of HD are mood change, coordination of muscles problem, uncontrolled movement, and difficulty in walking. The patient with HD may lose their intellectual and behavioural abilities and may also experience psychiatric symptoms [3]. For ALS patient, a part of nerve cells that control muscle function is destroyed. Characteristic of this disease is continuous muscle atrophy. It causes muscle weakness and tenderness. The general symptoms in ALS are difficulty in walking, swallowing, breathing, and speaking [4]. In [5], they found that the patients with neurodegenerative diseases had decreased stride length as compared to healthy control subjects. From above reasons, the stride-to-stride of gait information is utilized for gait pattern classification in patients with neurodegenerative diseases because of the gait pattern difference between healthy and NDD subjects.
In recent related studies, the information from time series of stride intervals, swing intervals, and stance intervals of stride-to-stride is utilized to classify the gait pattern of the patient with NDDs and healthy control subjects. Some research works involved detecting either PD or ALS only [9, 13, 14]. Some of them involved HD, ALS, and PD classification [8, 10–12]; however, the information from left and right feet is used in the system....