Parkinson’s Disease Patient Monitoring: A Real-Time Tracking and Tremor Detection System Based on Magnetic Measurements

Abstract

Reliable diagnosis of early-stage Parkinson’s disease is an important task, since it permits the administration of a timely treatment, slowing the progression of the disease. Together with non-motor symptoms, other important signs of disease can be retrieved from the measurement of the movement trajectory and from tremor appearances. To measure these signs, the paper proposes a magnetic tracking system able to collect information about translational and vibrational movements in a spatial cubic domain, using a low-cost, low-power and highly accurate solution. These features allow the usage of the proposed technology to realize a portable monitoring system, that may be operated at home or in general practices, enabling telemedicine and preventing saturation of large neurological centers. Validation is based on three tests: movement trajectory tracking, a rest tremor test and a finger tapping test. These tests are considered in the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale and are provided as case studies to prove the system’s capabilities to track and detect tremor frequencies. In the case of the tapping test, a preliminary classification scheme is also proposed to discriminate between healthy and ill patients. No human patients are involved in the tests, and most cases are emulated by means of a robotic arm, suitably driven to perform required tasks. Tapping test results show a classification accuracy of about 93% using a k-NN classification algorithm, while imposed tremor frequencies have been correctly detected by the system in the other two tests.

Technological support for people with Parkinson’s disease: a narrative review

“…There is an ongoing and substantial interest on identifying a system to track and quantitatively measure RT. In 2021 and 2020, Milano et al 55 and Ferrigno et al 56 proposed a tracking system based on magnetic measurements to track the movement of a robotic arm. The work validated a system able to obtain a rapid and real-time diagnosis of PD symptoms.…”

Development and Assessment of a Movement Disorder Simulator Based on Inertial Data

“…The depth camera system is economic and easy to use in movement detection applications, but it presents occlusion issues during upper limbs' joint movement or their sudden exit from the field of view [12]. Another study proposed a magnetic, low-cost, and scalable system to monitor the evolution of PD [8]. In particular, the system focused on two parameters: tremor and hands trajectory, and an anchored magnetic measuring system was used to assess the position of the hand in a 3D limited space and a single accelerometer, with a sampling frequency of 100 Hz to detect tremor.…”

“…The ability to choose the sensor's capabilities, metrological features, and noise contribution, and the resolution of the sensing system and kind of motor pathology for the simulation makes the developed simulator a widely applicable tool, since it allows characterizing the algorithms with an arbitrary level of measurement data quality and to generate data for a customizable period of time, avoiding limitations intrinsically present in already available datasets. Specifically, stemming from the authors' experience in PD monitoring [8,9], this paper presents the development and validation of a pathological movement simulator capable of generating motion and tremor data fully compliant with real measurements performed by IMU devices having specified metrological features.…”

Strain Gauge Measuring System for Subsensory Micromotions Analysis as an Element of a Hybrid Human–Machine Interface

“…Currently, various instrumental methods for measuring tremor parameters are actively being developed and used in clinical practice: mechanography [ 15 ], electromyography [ 16 ], methods based on video registration [ 17 ], methods involving the use of various sensors (force registration sensors, accelerometers, capacitive sensors, sensors recording changes in magnetic field during movement, etc.) [ 18 , 19 , 20 ], and special wearable devices [ 21 , 22 ]. A detailed comparative review of the sensors allowing for the estimation of the tremor is given in [ 23 ].…”