Towards a telehealth infrastructure supported by machine learning on edge/fog for Parkinson's movement screening

Approximately 10 million people worldwide live with Parkinson's disease (PD), a progressive and incurable neurological movement disorder. Symptomatic treatment is available for PD but requires patients to make periodic clinic visits (2–3 times per year) for symptom assessment. Advanced telehealth technologies can enhance clinical care for PD but warrant an Internet-of-Things-based (IoT) infrastructure that can enable symptom monitoring in out-of-clinic settings, such as homes. In this paper, we present an edge and Fog device-based IoT framework and a machine learning-based telehealth infrastructure that can detect and classify hand movement tasks based on a clinical test (UPDRS) for remote symptom assessment. We used a pair of smart gloves integrated with finger flex sensors, an inertial measurement unit (IMU), and a wireless embedded system (i.e., an edge device) to record the hand movements. The edge device (ESP32) detected the activity on the edge node and transmitted the data to the Fog node for classification. The Fog node (Raspberry pi) hosted the Machine Learning (ML) based activity classification models to classify UPDRS-based hand movement tasks. In this paper, we present the development of edge-fog-supported ML infrastructure. To develop ML models, we utilized the data of 9 participants (five healthy and four people with PD) who performed hand movements tasks while wearing the smart gloves. We developed and tested different classification models such as K-nearest neighbors (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Decision Tree (DT) to identify which one fits best for such an edge-fog infrastructure for remote symptom assessment. Results showed that the SVM model outperformed others by giving 94% training, 94% testing, and 93% validation accuracy with a mean inference time of 560 μs on the Fog node. Our preliminary results are promising to further our research in deploying the edge-fog-driven ML-based telehealth infrastructure in real-world settings.