Instrumental Assessment of Motor Symptoms by Means of Wearable Sensors in Patients With Parkinson's Disease

The clinical management of Parkinson's disease (PD) is frequently challenged by the occurrence of motor disorders and complications, such as freezing of gait, fluctuations and the ON-OFF phenomenon, primarily manifesting at home. Therapeutic decisions are usually based on periodic neurological examinations and patients' anamnestic experience collected in an outpatient setting, thus limited by several issues, including "recall bias" and subjective, semi-quantitative and operator-dependent evaluations in non-ecological settings. In the last two decades, new wearable technologies, consisting of "wireless" sensors (e.g., inertial, electromyography), have been widely applied to quantitatively assess movements in physiological and pathological conditions, even for prolonged periods in free-living settings (i.e., long-term monitoring). The aim of this study is to evaluate motor symptoms in patients with PD, such as bradykinesia, tremor, gait disturbances and balance disorders, objectively and quantitatively through the application of wearable sensors in intra- and extra hospital settings, also during common activities of daily living, in order to obtain ecological data possibly useful in the therapeutic management of the disease.