A Tracking Task for Quantifying Loss of Motor Skills due to Parkinson’s Disease

Title

A Tracking Task for Quantifying Loss of Motor Skills due to Parkinson’s Disease

 Author

De Vries, R.J.

Contributor

Pool, D.M. (mentor)

Faculty

Aerospace Engineering

 Department

Control and Simulation

 Date

2016-06-02

 Abstract

This paper investigated if a pursuit tracking task could be used to quantify the loss of motor skills due to Parkinson's disease (PD) by using system identification methods. A human-in-the-loop experiment consisting of PD patients and a healthy age-gender matched control group was conducted at the Erasmus University Medical Center. A pursuit display combined with a quasi-random multisinus target signal and single integrator dynamics was used. Such a tracking task makes it possible to model human controller behavior to estimate human parameters, such as the control gain and time delays. The performance of patients was found to be worse compared to the control group. The control gain was found to be significantly higher for the control group compared to patients. Patients had a significantly higher neuromuscular damping compared to the control group. Therefore, a tracking task could be used as a tool to quantify the loss of motor skill due to PD. This might improve the early detection and the treatment of PD.

 Subject

manual control
Parkinson's disease
system identification

 To reference this document use:

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:08fa6ced-81e0-4d6a-9242-952b383562fb

 Embargo date

2021-06-02

 Part of collection

Student theses

 Document type

master thesis

 Rights

(c) 2016 De Vries, R.J.
Files
PDF Thesis_Rick_de_Vries.pdf 2.34 MB
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