Future Opportunities for IoT to Support People with Parkinson’s

Recent years have seen an explosion of internet of things (IoT) technologies being released to the market. There has also been an emerging interest in the potentials of IoT devices to support people with chronic health conditions. In this paper, we describe the results of engagements to scope the future potentials of IoT for supporting people with Parkinson’s. We ran a 2-day multi-disciplinary event with professionals with expertise in Parkinson’s and IoT, to explore the opportunities, challenges and benefits. We then ran 4 workshops, engaging 13 people with Parkinson’s and caregivers, to scope out the needs, values and desires that the community has for utilizing IoT to monitor their symptoms. This work contributes a set of considerations for future IoT solutions that might support people with Parkinson’s in better understanding their condition, through the provision of objective measurements that correspond to their, currently unmeasured, subjective experiences

Exploring the Usage of Text-Entry as a Digital Endpoint in Parkinson’s Disease

Tese de mestrado, Informática, 2022, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de CiênciasNeurodegenerative diseases are a group of diseases characterised by the loss of neurons and tend to be fatal. The most researched being Parkinson’s disease, some connections have been established between this disease and the use of text-entry towards its diagnosis and monitoring. With such scattered information regarding neurodegenerative diseases and text-entry, a systematic review was carried out to show which diseases have been researched in that direction, being mainly PD but also MCI and MS. The main metrics collected were flight time, hold time and pressure. As previous research did not include clinicians participation towards the design of diagnosing and monitoring tools, this dissertation went a step further and worked together with clinicians to understand their expectations on data and its visualisations. Clinicians believe that text-entry does have potential towards the diagnosis and monitoring of neurodegenerative diseases. Clinicians also provided concepts of interest against recently suggested metrics, such as apraxia, bradykinesia and dyskinesia. Finally, it was possible to understand how clinicians would deem to be the best way to view the data for the patients’ assessments

Exploring the Role of Cognitive Reserve in Parkinson’s Disease Patient’s Responsiveness to Levodopa Treatment

This item is only available electronically.Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease characterised by dopamine loss. Dopamine medication as levodopa has been established to reduce PD motor symptoms and seemingly has erratic consequences for cognition. Cognitive reserve (CR), the mind’s resistance to brain damage, has been proposed to justify PD patients experiencing different impairments despite no significant neuropathological differences. Given the interaction between CR and levodopa state change is unexplored for PD, we sought to determine if CR predicts levodopa responsiveness and the role of other possible predictors. We tested six PD patient’s motor and fluid intelligence performance ON and OFF levodopa, to determine any variations in levodopa responsiveness. CR was measured with the comprehensive Cognitive Reserve Index questionnaire and a premorbid intelligence test. Motor and fluid intelligence performance was assessed with five precise measures of different abilities in ON and OFF levodopa states. Time limited data collection, meaning 80 PD patients were simulated from the six PD patients to meet regression conditions. We found CR did not significantly predict how PD patients responded to levodopa when controlling for age and levodopa equivalent dose (LED). However, LED was a significant predictor of change in motor and fluid intelligence performance, therefore acting as the most important contributing variable towards levodopa responsiveness. Age displayed a significant relationship with change in fluid intelligence performance. These findings suggest CR’s protective ability for PD was negligible when considering change in levodopa states and LED was the predominant levodopa responsiveness predictor. Implications for PD treating clinicians and patients are explored.Thesis (B.PsychSc(Hons)) -- University of Adelaide, School of Psychology, 202

WiiPD - An Approach for the Objective Home Assessment of Parkinson's Disease

Activity modelling and discovery plays a critical role in smart home based assisted living. Existing approaches to pattern recognition using data-intensive analysis suffers from various drawbacks. To address these shortcomings, this paper introduces a novel ontology-based approach to activity modelling, activity discovery and evolution. In this approach, activity modelling is undertaken through ontological engineering by leveraging domain knowledge and heuristics. The generated activity models evolve from the initial “seed” activity models through continuous activity discovery and learning. Activity discovery is performed through ontological reasoning. The paper describes the approach in the context of smart home with special emphases placed on activity discovery algorithms and evolution mechanism. The approach has been implemented in a feature-rich assistive living system in which new daily activities can be detected and further used to evolve the underlying activity models

WiiPD: Objective Home Assessment of Parkinson's Disease using the Nintendo Wii Remote

Current clinical methods for the assessment of Parkinson's disease (PD) suffer from inconvenience, infrequency, and subjectivity. WiiPD is an approach for the objective home-based assessment of PD which utilizes the intuitive and sensor-rich Nintendo Wii remote. Combined with an electronic patient diary, a suite of minigames, a metric analyzer, and a visualization engine, we propose that this system can complement existing clinical practice by providing objective metrics gathered frequently over extended periods of time. In this paper, we detail the approach and introduce a series of metrics deemed capable of quantifying the severity of tremor and bradykinesia in those with PD. The system has been tested on a 71-year-old participant with PD over a period of 15 days, a 72-year-old control user without PD, and a group of eight young adults. Results indicate a clear correlation between patient self-rating scores of tremor severity and metric values obtained, in addition to clear differences in metrics obtained from each user group. These results suggest that this approach is capable of indicating the presence and severity of the motor symptoms of PD that affect arm motor control