Researchers Use mHealth to Track, Assess Parkinson’s Movements
A new study led by IBM and Phizer found that an mHealth platform used to track and assess movement by people living with Parkinson's could be used to rate the severity of their tremors and aid in care management.
- mHealth researchers are reporting that wearables combined with an AI platform can help healthcare providers track the severity of Parkinson’s disease.
As reported in a recent issue of Nature, a team of researchers from IBM, the Pfizer Innovation Research Lab, Boston University’s Spivack Center for Clinical & Translational Bioscience and Tufts Medical Center conducted a study using wearable devices and an AI algorithm. They found that the connected health platform could be used to measure the severity of tremors – which, in turn, could help providers adjust care management, particularly medication use.
Their study compared the actions of 45 healthy participants to 35 patients living with Parkinson’s, who were given a wrist-worn accelerometer and asked to perform certain hand and walking movements. Researchers compared the movements and broke them down into segments and sequences that could be measured and analyzed. An AI algorithm was then used to identify movements affected by Parkinson’s and rate the severity of the symptoms.
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