Pumpkin garden: A mobile game platform for monitoring parkinson’s disease symptoms

Abstract

Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is one of the most common neurodegenerative disorders that the elderly are prone to. The recent statistics shows that PD threatens the living quality of over 10 million people worldwide and most of the patients are over 60 ages. Though some medications have been found to be effective in the management of disease progression, the conditions of patients’ symptoms need to be monitored carefully to ensure the effectiveness of appropriate dosage of medications and other necessary treatments to be applied in case that the medications become less effective. Therefore, to facilitate patients and clinicians to have an objective assessment of the conditions of PD symptoms and monitor the effectiveness of treatment, we design a mobile game platform – Pumpkin Garden, which is able to encourage patients to assess their daily conditions through playing games. The patients in-game behaviors are collected and analyzed to generate reports for patients and clinicians to track the response to medications and conditions of disease progression.