Artificial Hydrocarbon Networks for Freezing of Gait Detection in Parkinso’s Disease

Freezing of gait (FoG) is one of the most impairing phenomenon experienced by Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. This phenomenon is associated with falls and is an important factor that limits autonomy and impairs quality of life of PD patients. Pharmacological treatment is difficult and do not always help to deal with this problem. Robust FoG detection systems can help monitoring and identifying when a patient needs aid providing external cueing to deal with FoG episodes. In this paper, we describe a comparative analysis of traditional machine learning techniques against Artificial Hydrocarbon Networks (AHN) for FoG detection. We compared four supervised machine learning classifiers and AHN for FoG event detection using a publicly available dataset, obtaining 88% of F-score metric with AHN. We prove that AHN are suitable for FoG detection.