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

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.