An architecture to manage motor disorders in Parkinson's disease

Telemedicine systems for remote monitoring are gaining importance given the increase in aging population. Possible limitations to their diffusion in daily living situations can lay on usability and social acceptability barriers. In this work we propose an architecture for remote monitoring and management of motor disorders applied on Parkinsonian patients suffering of Freezing of Gait (FoG). The architecture is composed of a smartphone app, a database (DB) and a web app, hence it uses only technologies that are well known and diffuse among society. The smartphone app monitors gait parameters and provide acoustic feedback (cues) to the patient when it detects a FoG episode. Furthermore the app stores all the informations collected in a local DB and periodically sends them to the central DB when Internet connection is available. The web app provides graphic user interfaces to query the DB to observe FoG monitoring data and to remotely adjust patient's rehabilitation and pharmacological therapies. The architecture was tested on 6 Parkinsonian patients, results about FoG detection accuracy and cues effectiveness are reported.