Abstract
The increment of the prevalence of neurological diseases due to the trend in population aging demands for new strategies in disease management. In Parkinson’s disease (PD), these strategies should aim at improving diagnosis accuracy and frequency of the clinical follow-up by means of decentralized cost-effective solutions. In this context, a system suitable for the remote monitoring of PD subjects is presented. It consists of the integration of two approaches investigated in our previous works, each one appropriate for the movement analysis of specific parts of the body: low-cost optical devices for the upper limbs and wearable sensors for the lower ones. The system performs the automated assessments of six motor tasks of the unified Parkinson’s disease rating scale, and it is equipped with a gesture-based human machine interface designed to facilitate the user interaction and the system management. The usability of the system has been evaluated by means of standard questionnaires, and the accuracy of the automated assessment has been verified experimentally. The results demonstrate that the proposed solution represents a substantial improvement in PD assessment respect to the former two approaches treated separately, and a new example of an accurate, feasible and cost-effective mean for the decentralized management of PD.
Highlights
In 2030, in Western Europe and in the ten most populous nations of the world, the estimated number of individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD) will be over 8 million [1]
The mean values of the kinematic parameters extracted from the performances of the healthy control (HC) subjects were used as the optimal subset to conveniently scale the kinematic parameters for PD subjects, in order to make them monotonically decreasing in correspondence with the increase of the severity class assigned
unified Parkinson’s disease rating scale (UPDRS) class) and 1 to the best value for each parameter
Summary
In 2030, in Western Europe and in the ten most populous nations of the world, the estimated number of individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD) will be over 8 million [1]. Since 1967, when the motor effects of Levodopa (LD) on bradykinesia have been shown for the first time in a video [2], the way has been traced towards the quantification of movement disorders and their therapeutic response. This pathway passes through semi-quantitative rating scales, such as the Hoehn and Yahr stage and unified Parkinson’s disease rating scale (UPDRS), which is still the gold standard scale for assessing symptoms in PD [3]. A percentage of incorrect diagnosis of 25% has been reported, especially when symptoms such as essential tremor, vascular parkinsonism and atypical parkinsonian syndromes manifest [5]
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