Project Grant R21EB039456

The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering awarded Case Western Reserve University $218,869 under the Discovery and Applied Research for Technological Innovations to Improve Human Health program (CFDA 93.286) on August 18, 2026.

The research develops and validates a novel framework for detecting freezing of gait (FOG), a sudden inability to walk affecting people with advanced Parkinson's disease and a primary cause of PD-related falls in older adults. Aim 1 uses generative artificial intelligence models to synthesize high-fidelity inertial measurement unit sensor data representing FOG, walking, and voluntary stopping, with the hypothesis that augmenting training data with synthetic samples will improve FOG detection algorithm performance, robustness, and generalization to external test sets. Aim 2 characterizes oculomotor biomarkers captured with a lightweight wearable eye tracker, with the hypothesis that integrating gaze, blink, and pupil features with IMU signals will enhance FOG-detection sensitivity and reduce false alarms when voluntary stops occur. A prospective dataset of synchronized IMU and eye-tracking recordings from 25 adults with PD who experience daily FOG will support both aims. Successful completion will yield a proof-of-concept for a more robust detector, validated generative AI and eye-tracking methods, and a publicly available multimodal FOG dataset and codebase.

The award funds research performed at Case Western Reserve University's Office of Research Administration in Cleveland, Ohio, in affiliation with University Hospitals of Cleveland. Performance period runs through May 31, 2029. This is a Project Grant, an exploratory R21 award supporting hypothesis-driven research.