A Preliminary Investigation into Quantitative Assessment of ADHD Treatment Efficacy on Hyperactivity Levels via Actigraphy*

The diagnosis and assessment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in clinical practice heavily rely on subjective and biased scales. This study explores the feasibility of using actigraphy measurements to objectively assess and monitor the treatment response of ADHD in children receiving medication. A cohort of ten children underwent evaluation using three scales, one administered by child-adolescent psychiatrists and two completed by the parents, both pre- and post-medication. In addition, two sets of actigraphy recordings were collected, each spanning seven consecutive days, before and after medication administration. The study revealed that changes in the median, mean, and skewness of accelerations in spherical coordinates exhibited stronger correlations with changes in the scale scores in comparison to other features. Additionally, binary classifications using feature sets with top correlations and PCA features defining 95% variability showed better predictions for ADHD treatment response assessed by TURGAY DSM-IV-S (82%) and WFIRS-life skills (81.4%) scores compared to WFIRS-school behavior (63.9%) scores. These findings represent the first reported correlations between ADHD scales and a broad range of features. Additionally, they demonstrate the feasibility of using actigraphy data to predict ADHD treatment response for the first time.