DAPHNE: A Novel e-Health System for the Diagnosis and the Treatment of Parkinson’s Disease

Abstract

Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that affects millions of people worldwide. A standardised objective tool for PD diagnosis and management is still missing and the adopted monitoring approaches are suboptimal. The development of a technological solution implementing e-health systems is investigated in various research projects. In this paper we propose DAPHNE system, aimed to implement innovative and sustainable services for the early diagnosis, for the therapy and for the management of PD by using wearable devices, information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as mobile Health (mHealth) apps and Internet of things (IoT) protocols. To such a degree, DAPHNE successfully proposes an Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solution that supports the clinicians in early and differential diagnosis, promotes a precision medicine approach by enabling an at-home monitoring service optimised according the patient’s needs, stimulates the self-management of patients and caregivers in the care path, significantly reduces healthcare costs in terms of diagnostic examinations/hospitalisation and, as major breakthrough, permits a PD diagnosis up to 7 years earlier than current methods, so maximising the drug therapy efficacy.