Wearability assessment of a wearable system for Parkinson's disease remote monitoring based on a body area network of sensors.

Jorge Cancela,Matteo Pastorino,Dimitrios I Fotiadis,Alexandros T Tzallas,Giorgios Rigas,Maria T Arredondo,Markos G Tsipouras

doi:10.3390/s140917235

Jorge Cancela, Matteo Pastorino + Show 5 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/s140917235

Copy DOI

Abstract

Wearable technologies for health monitoring have become a reality in the last few years. So far, most research studies have focused on assessments of the technical performance of these systems, as well as the validation of the clinical outcomes. Nevertheless, the success in the acceptance of these solutions depends not only on the technical and clinical effectiveness, but on the final user acceptance. In this work the compliance of a telehealth system for the remote monitoring of Parkinson's disease (PD) patients is presented with testing in 32 PD patients. This system, called PERFORM, is based on a Body Area Network (BAN) of sensors which has already been validated both from the technical and clinical point for view. Diverse methodologies (REBA, Borg and CRS scales in combination with a body map) are employed to study the comfort, biomechanical and physiological effects of the system. The test results allow us to conclude that the acceptance of this system is satisfactory with all the levels of effect on each component scoring in the lowest ranges. This study also provided useful insights and guidelines to lead to redesign of the system to improve patient compliance.

Highlights

During the last decade, we have witnessed an incredible advancement in the growth of wearable technologies for health monitoring and long-term monitoring of patients and healthy subjects, in their daily lives
This work presents a wearability assessment which complements the papers [1,2,3,4] that we have already published describing the technical performance for the detection and quantification of Parkinson’s disease (PD) system using a Body Area Network (BAN) of sensors
The loading might be localised and result to perceptions of muscle fatigue. In this case the results presented here are the posture and movement analysis based on the Rapid Entire Body Assessment (REBA) score with and without wearing the device and the musculoskeletal loading based on the self-assessment of the patients with a Borg CR-10 scale and a body map

Summary

Introduction

We have witnessed an incredible advancement in the growth of wearable technologies for health monitoring and long-term monitoring of patients and healthy subjects, in their daily lives. Health monitoring applications often integrate different sensors into a sensor network around the subject or the patient. In the case of the PERFORM system a Body Area Network (BAN) was designed to monitor all major symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (PD). The use of these systems can be highly intrusive and uncomfortable for the patients and this could lead the application to fail, even when it has been proven that it benefits patients’ health. During the prototyping phase most works focus exclusively on the technical performance of the system and ignore or bypass the wearability and compliance analysis. Our analysis might be extended to other similar systems, since most of factors have been taken into account

Methods

Results

Conclusion