A self-managed, home-based system for the automated assessment of a selected set of Parkinson’s disease motor symptoms is presented. The system makes use of an optical RGB-Depth device both to implement its gesture-based human computer interface and for the characterization and the evaluation of posture and motor tasks, which are specified according to the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS). Posture, lower limb movements and postural instability are characterized by kinematic parameters of the patient movement. During an experimental campaign, the performances of patients affected by Parkinson’s disease were simultaneously scored by neurologists and analyzed by the system. The sets of parameters which best correlated with the UPDRS scores of subjects’ performances were then used to train supervised classifiers for the automated assessment of new instances of the tasks. Results on the system usability and the assessment accuracy, as compared to clinical evaluations, indicate that the system is feasible for an objective and automated assessment of Parkinson’s disease at home, and it could be the basis for the development of neuromonitoring and neurorehabilitation applications in a telemedicine framework.

A home-based, reliable, objective and automated assessment of motor performance of patients affected by Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is important in disease management, both to monitor therapy efficacy and to reduce costs and discomforts. In this context, we have developed a self-managed system for the automated assessment of the PD upper limb motor tasks as specified by the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS). The system is built around a Human Computer Interface (HCI) based on an optical RGB-Depth device and a replicable software. The HCI accuracy and reliability of the hand tracking compares favorably against consumer hand tracking devices as verified by an optoelectronic system as reference. The interface allows gestural interactions with visual feedback, providing a system management suitable for motor impaired users. The system software characterizes hand movements by kinematic parameters of their trajectories. The correlation between selected parameters and clinical UPDRS scores of patient performance is used to assess new task instances by a machine learning approach based on supervised classifiers. The classifiers have been trained by an experimental campaign on cohorts of PD patients. Experimental results show that automated assessments of the system replicate clinical ones, demonstrating its effectiveness in home monitoring of PD.

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