Effectiveness of botulinum toxin treatment and rehabilitation program in lateral axial dystonia in Parkinson's disease

Abstract

Moreover, the system monitors any abnormal forward inclination of the trunk. This applicationwasoriginallydevelopedusingMatlab GUIBuilder, thenported to Java and includedas a library inAndroid, to realize a stand-alone smartphone app. The AF app resulted in an event-driven finite statemachinewith 4 states: disconnected, connected, calibrated and training. Noteworthy, the application is able to automatically increase the difficulty of the task once the patient is able to remain constantly in the target zone, and to adjust the verbosity of messages restitution based on patient’s preferences. The system was intensively tested and debugged on control subjects. Discussion: Using a set of customwearable inertial sensorswith advanced on-board processing capabilities, an application able to perform real-time gait analysis and provide AF to patients with PD was developed. The main advantages of the system are the closedloop AF modality and its portability: it can be comfortably worn with no range restrictions, it can be run by the patient by pressing a single button on a smartphone, and it realizes a subject specific rehabilitation program. In the typical scenario of use, the patient walks freely outdoors, e.g. in a park, over single ormultiple periods of 30min, receiving AF and in the same time being quantitatively monitored on gait performance. Acknowledgement: The research leading to these results has been partially founded by the European Union – Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 288516 (CuPiD project).