Improving Walking Ability in Parkinson Disease

Gait impairments of patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) limit the independence in the daily activities and sensibly increase the risk of falls. New gait analysis methods, based on wearable inertial sensors, have been proposed to track the gait features during treatment and in real-life conditions. Gait training based on auditory cues as Rhythmical Auditory Stimulation (RAS) have preliminarily shown positive effects improving gait velocity, stride length, step cadence of walking in PD. In the current project, the research group will aim to develop a smartphone application (Parkinson App Smartphone Aimed: P.A.St.A.) integrated with sensors and RAS. In a second time, investigators will analyze the spatio-temporal gait parameters obtained by the wearable sensors and the sociodemographic and clinical data, thus generating a big data set, to improve the knowledge about current pharmacological therapies and rehabilitation.