Tese de mestrado, Informática, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2022Parkinson's disease is a common neurodegenerative disease that affects a large
part of the world's population. This disease involves a lot of symptoms, however the
most prevalent is the change in the patient's movements or even the loss of
functionality. There is no treatment, however it exists medication that relieves and
reduces the symptoms for a period. A Parkinson’s patient needs to be watched by
clinicians to understand if the medication is working correctly and to analyse the disease
progression. The current way of doing this evaluation is at clinics where the patient
needs to go to the clinic or to live there. With this into consideration it was requested a
monitoring system of activities of daily living for Parkinson’s patient.
The monitoring system consists in a mobile application in an Android smartphone
serving as a diary for the patient of clinician to record the activities done at that
moment. With this application, the patient needs to wear an accelerometer in the wrist to
gather the acceleration in the 3-axis. The application besides the monitoring function, it
gives the ability to the clinician to schedule lists of activities for the patient to do during
the day, allowing the clinician to have some control.
We carried out a study with 10 healthy participants which used the monitorization
system for 3 days each. The patient would worn the accelerometer and record the
activities that they would do throughout the day, was asked a minimum of 5 activities
per day. Alongside this recording it was schedule 1 list of activities to be carried out
each day, this list only had motor activities such as walk, sit down, and stand up. At the
end of each participant study, it was made a questionnaire with standard usability
questions and an interview that helped us understand if the system was reliable or not
