Abstract
There are many techniques using sensors and wearable devices for detecting and monitoring patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). A recent development is the utilization of human interaction with computer keyboards for analyzing and identifying motor signs in the early stages of the disease. Current designs for classification of time series of computer-key hold durations recorded from healthy control and PD subjects require the time series of length to be considerably long. With an attempt to avoid discomfort to participants in performing long physical tasks for data recording, this paper introduces the use of fuzzy recurrence plots of very short time series as input data for the machine training and classification with long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks. Being an original approach that is able to both significantly increase the feature dimensions and provides the property of deterministic dynamical systems of very short time series for information processing carried out by an LSTM layer architecture, fuzzy recurrence plots provide promising results and outperform the direct input of the time series for the classification of healthy control and early PD subjects.