Transition dynamics modeling of pre-trained accelerometry representations for time to diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease

Early identification of Parkinson's disease is critical for timely intervention. Disruptions in sleep architecture and changes in physical activity patterns have been reported years before motor symptom onset, yet prodromal behavioral changes spanning sleep and daytime activity patterns are subtle and difficult to detect with conventional clinical tools. Wearable sensors provide a scalable means of monitoring these behaviors in natural settings, but extracting meaningful, interpretable features from high-frequency, unlabeled time series remains a major challenge. We present an end-to-end framework for assessing Parkinson's disease risk from wrist-worn accelerometry via automated feature extraction and survival modeling of time to diagnosis. Behavioral states are derived from unlabeled data using pretrained models including random forests with hidden Markov models for physical activity classification and a self-supervised learning based sleep staging model. We jointly model both sleep stage and physical activity sequences using hierarchical nonstationary Markov chains stratified by time of day and temporal resolution, characterizing individual-level behavioral rhythms and transition dynamics. Gradient-boosted Cox proportional hazards models are then used to estimate Parkinson's disease risk from these transition-based features. Applied to accelerometer data from the UK Biobank, our approach outperforms baselines that exclude dynamic modeling or rely on traditional functional data analysis, while providing interpretable predictors from long sequences of wearable sensor data. This demonstrates the potential of integrating pretrained AI models, temporal sequence modeling, and survival analysis to detect early behavioral signatures of neurodegeneration.