SASE-TCN: A Multitask Learning Network for MDS-UPDRS III Task Classification and Parkinson’s Disease Recognition

As wearable technology and machine learning (ML) algorithms have developed by leaps and bounds, many studies have focused on automatically monitoring Parkinson’s disease (PD). The procedure includes two steps: first, classifying activities, usually the Movement Disorder Society-sponsored revision of the unified PD rating scale (MDS-UPDRS) part III tasks; second, evaluating the performance of these activities and recognizing PD. To improve the efficiency and precision of the procedure, this study proposes a self-attention squeeze-and-excitation temporal convolutional network (SASE-TCN). Based on the multistage temporal convolutional network (MS-TCN) and attention mechanisms, SASE-TCN can effectively extract the distant sequential and channelwise features. In addition, based on acceleration signals, SASE-TCN can classify MDS-UPDRS III tasks and recognize patients with PD simultaneously with the multitask learning mechanism. The model was tested with two public datasets, PD-BioStampRC21 and PD-motion. The SASE-TCN model obtained an average <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${F}1$ </tex-math></inline-formula> score of 0.7802–0.9160 for activity classification and an average accuracy of 0.7366–0.8578 for PD recognition. The results demonstrated the feasibility of the SASE-TCN in classifying PD-related activities and recognizing PD with accelerometers. This study will support the diagnosis and treatment of PD.