Self-Supervised Learning and Opportunistic Inference for Continuous Monitoring of Freezing of Gait in Parkinson's Disease

TL;DR

LIFT-PD is a self-supervised learning framework that enables real-time, energy-efficient detection of Freezing of Gait in Parkinson's patients using minimal labeled data and selective model activation.

Contribution

The paper introduces LIFT-PD, combining self-supervised pre-training, a differential hopping windowing technique, and an opportunistic activation module for efficient in-home PD symptom monitoring.

Findings

LIFT-PD improves precision by 7.25% over supervised models.

Achieves 4.4% higher accuracy with only 40% of labeled data.

Reduces inference time by up to 67% through selective activation.

Abstract

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive neurological disorder that impacts the quality of life significantly, making in-home monitoring of motor symptoms such as Freezing of Gait (FoG) critical. However, existing symptom monitoring technologies are power-hungry, rely on extensive amounts of labeled data, and operate in controlled settings. These shortcomings limit real-world deployment of the technology. This work presents LIFT-PD, a computationally-efficient self-supervised learning framework for real-time FoG detection. Our method combines self-supervised pre-training on unlabeled data with a novel differential hopping windowing technique to learn from limited labeled instances. An opportunistic model activation module further minimizes power consumption by selectively activating the deep learning module only during active periods. Extensive experimental results show that LIFT-PD achieves a 7.25% increase in precision and 4.4% improvement in accuracy compared to supervised models while using as low as 40% of the labeled training data used for supervised learning. Additionally, the model activation module reduces inference time by up to 67% compared to continuous inference. LIFT-PD paves the way for practical, energy-efficient, and unobtrusive in-home monitoring of PD patients with minimal labeling requirements.