Project Members: Angela Botros, Prabitha Urwyler, Martin Camenzind, Daniel Bolliger, Tim Vanbellingen, Rolf Kistler, Stephan Bohlhalter, Tobias Nef
Project Start: 01.09.2017
Project Funding: Hasler Foundation
Parkinson‘s disease (PD) is one of the most common neurodegenerative diseases affecting more than 4.1 million patients worldwide and about 15’000 patients in Switzerland alone. Since PD is age-related, the number of patients is expected to double by 2030 following demographic trends. The cardinal PD symptoms are movement-related, including resting tremor, rigidity, bradykinesia, postural instability and freezing of gait.
And while these approaches are able to identify the symptoms with high sensitivity and specificity, usually the underlying hardware is not designed for home- and long-term usage. The aim of this project is to develop a new system for the monitoring of PD motor symptoms, intended for long-term usage in a non-clinical environment, i.e. at the peoples homes. Key values are the simplicity, patient acceptance and robustness of the system.
Keywords: Parkinson's Disease, motor symptoms, wearable sensors, monitoring