Resumo

RAMIREZ, Juan; MORENO, Franklin  e  MEDINA, Rubén. Analysis of swing time series in the gait of parkinson patients. uct [online]. 2006, vol.10, n.40, pp.205-210. ISSN 1316-4821.

The gait of patients affected by Parkinson disease is characterized by a marked corporal unbalance, with instability of movements and an increase in the variability between steps. This article proposes a methodology to define new parameters, for Parkinson disease discrimination, extracted from the Time Series of Swing Interval (TSSI). The analyzed discrimination parameters are: the coefficient of variation, the power spectrum and the temporal averages of the Fourier Spectrogram. These parameters were evaluated using the TSSI of 15 Parkinson patients and 15 healthy persons. The statistical analysis, using the T-Student test, shows significant statistical differences between Parkinson patients and control subjects (p < 0.01). The proposed procedure could be used for early detection of alterations of the gait, and could be compatible with the premature diagnosis of Parkinson disease. However, this analysis does not discriminate between different neuro-degenerative diseases, thus, the proposed method should be complemented with other diagnosis clinical procedures.

Palavras-chave : Coefficient of Variation; Fourier Spectrogram; Parkinson Disease; Power Spectrum; TStudent Test.