Ambulatory and Remote Monitoring of Parkinson’s Disease Motor Symptoms

This chapter discusses the detailed development of the sensor network technology for assessing Parkinson’s disease motor symptoms and how several challenges were resolved by engineering teams to produce a clinically deployable system. The translation of existing medical technologies to mainstream clinical use can significantly impact healthcare access, costs and outcomes, including telehealth technologies for remote diagnosis and mobile, portable diagnostics for home-based monitoring. Carefully analysing and summarizing the intended patient characteristics, symptoms to be monitored and clinician requirements, as well as interpreting between clinical jargon and standard engineering notations to form a coherent set of input specifications, can make or break a new medical device technology. Clinicians will be responsible for reviewing and interpreting the data collected by the ambulatory sensor networks. By reducing motor fluctuations through optimized medication titration, events such as trips and falls may be avoided.