Implementation of an iPhone for characterizing Parkinson's disease tremor through a wireless accelerometer application

Abstract

Parkinson's disease represents a chronic movement disorder, which is generally proportionally to age. The status of Parkinson's disease is traditionally classified through ordinal scale strategies, such as the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale. However, the application of the ordinal scale strategy inherently requires highly specialized and limited medical resources for interpretation. An alternative strategy involves the implementation of an iPhone application that enables the device to serve as a functional wireless accelerometer system. The Parkinson's disease tremor attributes may be recorded in either an effectively autonomous public or private setting, for which the resultant accelerometer signal of the tremor can be conveyed wireless and through email to a remote location for data post-processing. The initial testing and evaluation of the iPhone wireless accelerometer application for quantifying Parkinson's disease tremor successfully demonstrates the capacity to acquire tremor characteristics in an effectively autonomous environment, while potentially alleviating strain on limited and highly specialized medical resources.

Wearable and wireless accelerometer systems for monitoring Parkinson’s disease patients—A perspective review

“…Wearable applications, such as wireless accelerometer devices, have been advocated for augmenting the clinical diagnostic acuity for optimizing a patient's unique drug therapy [3, 5,8]. The acquisition of patient-optimized deep brain stimulator parameter settings through the quantified feedback of wireless accelerometer systems has been advocated [5].…”

“…The acquisition of patient-optimized deep brain stimulator parameter settings through the quantified feedback of wireless accelerometer systems has been advocated [5]. Logically, the progressive evolution of wearable and wireless accelerometer systems may substantially improve quality of life for Parkinson's disease patients through specific and optimized therapy strategies.…”

“…The broad coverage range enables remote setting wireless transmission of the acceleration waveform data to distant post-processing resources. LeMoyne et al pioneered the application of the iPhone for the quantification of Parkinson's disease hand tremor [5].…”

“…With the growing prevalence of Parkinson's disease, wearable wireless applications may ameliorate strain on limited medical resources while improving patient quality of care. Over the recent half-decade, wireless accelerometer applications have been advocated and successfully tested and evaluated [3][4][5][6][7]. Wireless accelerometer systems enable the capacity to quantify and track patient status [3][4][5].…”

Smartphone and Portable Media Device: A Novel Pathway toward the Diagnostic Characterization of Human Movement

“…With the experiment conducted in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and postprocessing resources situated trans-continentally in greater Los Angeles, the application again demonstrates the ability to remotely situate experimental and post-processing resources. Tremor characteristics were successfully quantified for a person with Parkinson's disease and contrasted to a non-Parkinson's subject [24].…”