Towards remote evaluation of movement disorders via smartphones

Abstract

Recent advances in mobile phone technology have placed an impressive array of sensing and communication equipment at the hands of an ever-growing number of people. One of the areas which can potentially be transformed by the availability of what is essentially a cheap, ubiquitous networked sensor, is that of remote diagnosis of movement disorders, such as Parkinson's disease. This work describes a smartphone-based method for detecting and quantifying the hand tremor associated with movement disorders using signals from the accelerometer and gyroscope embedded in the patient's phone. Our approach is web-based and user-friendly, requiring minimal user interaction. In clinical experiments with twenty subjects, we found that by combining both accelerometer and gyroscope signals, we were able to correctly identify those with hand tremor, using very simple signal metrics.