Assessing the clinical utility of inertial sensors for home monitoring in Parkinson’s disease: a comprehensive review

Abstract

This review screened 296 articles on wearable sensors for home monitoring of people with Parkinson’s Disease within the PubMed Database, from January 2017 to May 2023. A three-level maturity framework was applied for classifying the aims of 59 studies included: demonstrating technical efficacy, diagnostic sensitivity, or clinical utility. As secondary analysis, user experience (usability and patient adherence) was evaluated. The evidences provided by the studies were categorized and stratified according to the level of maturity. Our results indicate that approximately 75% of articles investigated diagnostic sensitivity, i.e. correlation of sensor-data with clinical parameters. Evidence of clinical utility, defined as improvement on health outcomes or clinical decisions after the use of the wearables, was found only in nine papers. A third of the articles included reported evidence of user experience. Future research should focus more on clinical utility, to facilitate the translation of research results within the management of Parkinson’s Disease.