Trends and New Advances on Wearable and Mobile Technologies for Parkinson's Disease Monitoring and Assessment of Motor Symptoms: How New Technologies Can Support Parkinson's Disease

Background

The concept of monitoring individuals in the home and community settings was introduced more than 50 years ago, when Holter monitoring was proposed (in the late 1940s) and later adopted (in the 1960s) as a clinical tool. However, technologies to fully enable such vision were lacking and only sporadic and rather obtrusive monitoring techniques were available for several decades (Paolo Bonato, 2010). Recent advances in mobile and wearable technology have provided means to supplement the information gathered using tools based on patient's direct observation as well as interviews and questionnaires. The growth of mobile technologies has been raising in the last decades for general purpose, and consequently a new generation of wearable sensors and systems has recently become available thus providing clinical personnel with a “window of observation” in the home and community settings. These tools allow one to capture patients' activity level and exercise compliance, facilitate titration of medications in chronic patients, and provide means to assess the ability of patients to perform specific motor activities (Paolo Bonato, 2009). Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) of intelligent sensors represent an emerging technology for system integration with great potentials for unobtrusive ambulatory health monitoring during extended periods of time (E. Jovanov, 2005).