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A test battery, consisting of self-assessments and motor tests (tapping and spiral drawing tasks) was used on 9482 test occasions by 62 patients with advanced Parkinson's disease (PD) in a telemedicine setting. On each test occasion, three Archimedes spirals were traced. A new computer method, using wavelet transforms and principal component analysis processed the spiral drawings to generate a spiral score. In a web interface, two PD specialists rated drawing impairment in spiral drawings from three random test occasions per patient, using a modification of the Bain & Findley 10-category scale. A standardised manual rating was defined as the mean of the two raters' assessments. Bland-Altman analysis was used to evaluate agreement between the spiral score and the standardised manual rating. Another selection of spiral drawings was used to estimate the Spearman rank correlations between the raters (r = 0.87), and between the mean rating and the spiral score (r = 0.89). The 95% confidence interval for the method's prediction errors was +/- 1.5 scale units, which was similar to the differences between the human raters. In conclusion, the method could assess PD-related drawing impairments well comparable to trained raters.

This paper presents the development and evaluation of a method for enabling quantitative and automatic scoring of alternating tapping performance of patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Ten healthy elderly subjects and 95 patients in different clinical stages of PD have utilized a touch-pad handheld computer to perform alternate tapping tests in their home environments. First, a neurologist used a web-based system to visually assess impairments in four tapping dimensions (‘speed’, ‘accuracy’, ‘fatigue’ and ‘arrhythmia’) and a global tapping severity (GTS). Second, tapping signals were processed with time series analysis and statistical methods to derive 24 quantitative parameters. Third, principal component analysis was used to reduce the dimensions of these parameters and to obtain scores for the four dimensions. Finally, a logistic regression classifier was trained using a 10-fold stratified cross-validation to map the reduced parameters to the corresponding visually assessed GTS scores. Results showed that the computed scores correlated well to visually assessed scores and were significantly different across Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale scores of upper limb motor performance. In addition, they had good internal consistency, had good ability to discriminate between healthy elderly and patients in different disease stages, had good sensitivity to treatment interventions and could reflect the natural disease progression over time. In conclusion, the automatic method can be useful to objectively assess the tapping performance of PD patients and can be included in telemedicine tools for remote monitoring of tapping.

Objective. The purpose of this study was to examine repeated measures of fine motor function in relation to self-assessed motor conditions in Parkinson's disease (PD).

Methods. One-hundred PD patients, 65 with advanced PD and 35 patients with different disease stages have utilized a test battery in a telemedicine setting. On each test occasion, they initially self-assessed their motor condition (from ‘very off’ to ‘very dyskinetic’) and then performed a set of fine motor tests (tapping and spiral drawings).

Results. The motor tests scores were found to be the best during self-rated On. Self-rated dyskinesias caused more impaired spiral drawing performance (mean = 9.8% worse, P < 0.001) but at the same time tapping speed was faster (mean = 5.0% increase, P < 0.001), compared to scores in self-rated Off.

Conclusions. The fine motor tests of the test battery capture different symptoms; the spiral impairment primarily relates to dyskinesias whereas the tapping speed captures the Off symptoms.

A major problem with the clinical management of fluctuating movement disorders, e.g. Parkinson's disease (PD), is the large variability in manifestation of symptoms among patients. In this condition, frequent measurements which account for both patient-reported and objective assessments are needed in order to capture symptom fluctuations, with the purpose to optimize therapy. The main focus of this paper is to present a mobile-based system for enabling remote monitoring of PD patients from their home environment conditions. The system consists of a patient diary section for collecting patient-based self-assessments, a motor test section for collecting fine motor movements through upper limb motor tests, and a scheduler for restricting operation to a multitude of predetermined limited time intervals. The system processes and compiles time series data into different summary scores representing symptom severity. In addition, the paper presents a review of recent inventions which were filed after year 2000 in the field of telemedicine applications. The review includes a summary of systems and methods which enable remote symptom assessments of patients, not necessarily suffering from movement disorders, through repeated measurements and which take into account their subjective and/or objective health indicators. The findings conclude that there are a small number of inventions which collect subjective and objective health measures in telemedicine settings. Consequently, there is a lack of mechanisms that combine these two types of information into scores to provide a more in-depth assessment of the patient's general health, their motor and non-motor symptom fluctuations and treatment effects. The paper also provides a discussion concerning different approaches for analyzing and combining subjective and objective measures, and handling data from longitudinal studies.

This paper describes a web-based system for enabling remote monitoring of patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and supporting clinicians in treating their patients. The system consists of a patient node for subjective and objective data collection based on a handheld computer, a service node for data storage and processing, and a web application for data presentation. Using statistical and machine learning methods, time series of raw data are summarized into scores for conceptual symptom dimensions and an "overall test score" providing a comprehensive profile of patient's health during a test period of about one week. The handheld unit was used quarterly or biannually by 65 patients with advanced PD for up to four years at nine clinics in Sweden. The IBM Computer System Usability Questionnaire was administered to assess nurses' satisfaction with the web application. Results showed that a majority of the nurses were quite satisfied with the usability although a sizeable minority were not. Our findings support that this system can become an efficient tool to easily access relevant symptom information from the home environment of PD patients. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate if a telemetry test battery can be used to measure effects of Parkinson’s disease (PD) treatment intervention and disease progression.

Methods: Sixty-five patients diagnosed with advanced PD were recruited in an open longitudinal 36-month study; 35 treated with levodopa-carbidopa intestinal gel (LCIG) and 30 were candidates for switching from oral PD treatment to LCIG. They utilized a test battery, consisting of self-assessments of symptoms and fine motor tests (tapping and spiral drawings), four times per day in their homes during week-long test periods. The repeated measurements were summarized into an overall test score (OTS) to represent the global condition of the patient during a test period. Clinical assessments included ratings on Unified PD Rating Scale (UPDRS) and 39-item PD Questionnaire (PDQ-39) scales.

Results: In LCIG-naïve patients, mean OTS compared to baseline was significantly improved from the first test period on LCIG treatment until month 24. In LCIG-non-naïve patients, there were no significant changes in mean OTS, except at month 36 (P<0.01). The OTS correlated adequately with total UPDRS (rho = 0.59) and total PDQ-39 (0.59).

Conclusions: PD symptoms can be remotely monitored over time with this test battery. The trends of the test scores were similar to the trends of clinical rating scores. Correlations between OTS and clinical rating scales were adequate indicating that the test battery contains important elements of the information of the well-established scales.