A Viscoelastic Model to Evidence Reduced Upper-Limb-Swing Capabilities during Gait for Parkinson’s Disease-Affected Subjects

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a chronic neurodegenerative disorder with high worldwide prevalence that manifests with muscle rigidity, tremor, postural instability, and slowness of movement. These motor symptoms are mainly evaluated by clinicians via direct observations of patients and, as such, can potentially be influenced by personal biases and inter- and intra-rater differences. In order to provide more objective assessments, researchers have been developing technology-based systems aimed at objective measurements of motor symptoms, among which are the reduced and/or trembling swings of the lower limbs during gait tests, resulting in data that are potentially prone to more objective evaluations. Within this frame, although the swings of the upper limbs during walking are likewise important, no efforts have been made to reveal their support significance. To fill this lack, this work concerns a technology-based assessment of the forearm-swing capabilities of PD patients with respect to their healthy counterparts. This was obtained by adopting a viscoelastic model validated via measurements during gait tests tackled as an inverse dynamic problem aimed at determining the torque forces acting on the forearms. The obtained results evidence differences in the forearm movements during gait tests of healthy subjects and PD patients with different pathology levels, and, in particular, we evidenced how the worsening of the disease can cause the worsening of the mechanical support offered by the forearm’s swing to the walking process.