A Smart Wearable Ring Device for Sensing Hand Tremor of Parkinson’s Patients

Abstract

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a very common neurodegenerative disease that occurs mostly in the elderly. There are many main clinical manifestations of PD, such as tremor, bradykinesia, muscle rigidity, etc. Based on the current research on PD, the accurate and convenient detection of early symptoms is the key to detect PD. With the development of microelectronic and sensor technology, it is much easier to measure the barely noticeable tremor in just one hand for the early detection of Parkinson's disease. In this paper, we present a smart wearable device for detecting hand tremor, in which MPU6050 (MIDI Processing Unit) consisting of a 3-axis gyroscope and a 3-axis accelerometer is used to collect acceleration and angular velocity of fingers. By analyzing the time of specific finger movements, we successfully recognized the tremor signals with high accuracy. Meanwhile, with Bluetooth 4.0 (Bluetooth Low Energy, BLE) and networking terminal ability, tremor data can be transferred to a monitoring device in real time with extremely low energy consumption. The experimental results have shown that the proposed device (smart ring) is convenient for long-term tremor detection which is vital for early detection and treatment for Parkinson's disease.

Non-Contact Hand Movement Analysis for Optimal Configuration of Smart Sensors to Capture Parkinson’s Disease Hand Tremor

“…Research is required to identify the optimal body locations of such devices to monitor specific conditions. Parkinson's disease (PD) is a clinical condition incorporating technology/devices, such as rings and watches, for monitoring disease progression [12,15,25]. For objective quantification of PD severity, it is important to determine the best locations of these devices for capturing the subtleties of the symptoms.…”

“…Identifying the locations of maximal tremor motion allows patients with smaller tremor movements (which potentially can identify subtle symptoms or early signs of PD) to be captured and positions to be defined so comparisons can be standardised. With devices such as smart rings and watches becoming more common for health monitoring [15,25], investigation of the best locations to capture hand tremor movements is needed. Users also have variable preferences as to which location to place a device, i.e., which finger to wear a smart ring.…”

Assistive Methodologies for Parkinson's Disease Tremor Management—A Health Opinion

“…Tremor is an involuntary, unintended, periodic movement of the muscle of one or more parts of the body which can affect the head, legs, or arms, but predominantly the hands. The tremor ( 12 , 19 ) caused due to PD begins in a limb and progresses toward the hand and fingers. This is generally termed as a pill—rolling tremor where the movement rubs the thumb and forefinger back-and-forth.…”

Recognition for Human Gestures Based on Convolutional Neural Network Using the Off‐the‐Shelf Wi‐Fi Routers

“…Because with the advent of the urban Internet of Things, Wi-Fi devices will become ubiquitous, and Wi-Fi signals also spread throughout the home environment [4]. Wireless signals do not need to be received in the range of sight and can easily penetrate walls, so Wi-Fi has the advantages of easy deployment and low cost in activity recognition [5].…”