A case study in healthcare informatics: A telemedicine framework for automated Parkinson's disease symptom assessment

Abstract

This paper reports the development and evaluation of a mobile-based telemedicine framework for enabling remote monitoring of Parkinson's disease (PD) symptoms. The system consists of different measurement devices for remote collection, processing and presentation of symptom data of advanced PD patients. Different numerical analysis techniques were applied on the raw symptom data to extract clinically symptom information which in turn were then used in a machine learning process to be mapped to the standard clinician-based measures. The methods for quantitative and automatic assessment of symptoms were then evaluated for their clinimetric properties such as validity, reliability and sensitivity to change. Results from several studies indicate that the methods had good metrics suggesting that they are appropriate to quantitatively and objectively assess the severity of motor impairments of PD patients. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.