Remote smartphone monitoring for management of Parkinson's Disease

Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a disabling neurodegenerative disease that affects approximately 1 million people in the United States. PD symptoms such as tremor, rigidity, bradykinesia and gait disturbances can be alleviated with drug treatments or deep brain stimulation; however, these treatments need to be appropriately adjusted over time. Monitoring the disease severity during intermittent physician visits for this purpose is notoriously imprecise. Remote and continuous monitoring of the severity of parkinsonism in these patients could therefore significantly improve the patient's health and quality of life. In recent work, we showed it is possible to discriminate between varying levels of parkinsonism and normal brain activity, based on motor cortex electroencephalograms (EEGs). We believe it may be possible to detect similar patterns in ambulatory human EEGs collected periodically during home health care visits. In this study, we investigate how these EEG readings can be used together with continuous smartphone gyroscope and accelerometer movement measurements to allow improved management of Parkinson's Disease treatments.