Smartphone-based Tool Research Articles

A Smartphone-Based Tool for Assessing Parkinsonian Hand Tremor.

The aim of this study is to propose a practical smartphone-based tool to accurately assess upper limb tremor in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. The tool uses signals from the phone's accelerometer and gyroscope (as the phone is held or mounted on a subject's hand) to compute a set of metrics which can be used to quantify a patient's tremor symptoms. In a small-scale clinical study with 25 PD patients and 20 age-matched healthy volunteers, we combined our metrics with machine learning techniques to correctly classify 82% of the patients and 90% of the healthy volunteers, which is high compared to similar studies. The proposed method could be effective in assisting physicians in the clinic, or to remotely evaluate the patient's condition and communicate the results to the physician. Our tool is low cost, platform independent, noninvasive, and requires no expertise to use. It is also well matched to the standard clinical examination for PD and can keep the patient "connected" to his physician on a daily basis. Finally, it can facilitate the creation of anonymous profiles for PD patients, aiding further research on the effectiveness of medication or other overlooked aspects of patients' lives.

Development and initial evaluation of a smartphone application based on acceptance and commitment therapy

BackgroundAn intervention, consisting of an ACT-based smartphone-application and a web-based psychoeducation, has been developed. The smartphone-application, together with the psychoeducation, aims to function as a self-help intervention for living consistently with one's values. The study is an exploratory investigation of this new smartphone-based tool.Case descriptionPrimarily, the study aims at investigating a new field, providing a basis for generating hypotheses for further research. The first aim of this initial, exploratory study was to examine if this intervention had an effect on the variables of: valued actions, psychological flexibility, and life satisfaction as well as the states of depression, anxiety and stress, for a non-clinical sample of 11 Swedish Iphone users. This was made with a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design without control group. The second aim was to investigate how the participants experienced the intervention, as measured by a qualitative questionnaire.Discussion and evaluationThe group analyses showed that the participants increased their valued action and psychological flexibility significantly during the intervention. Furthermore, value-based actions and psychological flexibility showed small effect sizes when comparing pretest and posttest score. However, the design of the study makes it impossible to draw any certain conclusions. The qualitative questionnaire showed a general positive experience of the intervention.ConclusionsThe results from the present study indicated that the intervention should be studied further. The findings also generated a number of hypotheses that could be investigated in further research.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/2193-1801-1-11) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.