Wearable sensors in the diagnosis and study of Parkinson’s disease symptoms: a systematic review

Abstract

Nowadays, there are several diseases which affect different systems of the body, producing changes in the correct functioning of the organism and the people lifestyles. One of them is Parkinson’s disease (PD), which is defined as a neurodegenerative disorder provoked by the destruction of dopaminergic neurons in the brain, resulting in a set of motor and non-motor symptoms. As this disease affects principally to ancient people, several researchers have studied different treatments and therapies for stopping neurodegeneration and diminishing symptoms, to improve the quality patients’ lives. The most common therapies created for PD are based on pharmacological treatment for controlling the degeneration advance and the physical ones which do not reveal the progress of patients. For this reason, this review paper opens the possibility for using wearable motion capture systems as an option for the control and study of PD. Therefore, it aims to (1) study the different wearable systems used for capture the movements of PD patients and (2) determine which of them bring better results for monitoring and assess PD people. For the analysis, it uses papers based on experiments that prove the functioning of several motion systems in different aspects as monitoring, treatment and diagnose of the disease. As a result, it works with 30 papers which describe the factors mentioned before. Additionally, the paper uses journals and literature review about the pathology, its characteristics and the function of wearable sensors for the correct understanding of the topic.

Keywords:

• Parkinson’s disease
• wearable sensors
• motion capture
• inertial sensors

Acknowledgements

We want to thank Prof. Fernando Villalba and Alejandro Moreno for his support and guidance in this review, especially for impulse the curiosity to read and write about wearable sensor and motion capture systems as solutions for Parkinson’s disease monitoring.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

All authors had a substantial contribution to the creation of this systematic review.