Could Wearable and Mobile Technology Improve the Management of Essential Tremor?

Abstract

Essential tremor (ET) is the most common movement disorder. Individuals exhibit postural and kinetic tremor that worsens over time and patients may also exhibit other motor and non-motor symptoms. While millions of people are affected by this disorder worldwide, several barriers impede an optimal clinical management of symptoms. In this paper, we discuss the impact of ET on patients and review major issues to the optimal management of ET; from the side-effects and limited efficacy of current medical treatments to the limited number of people who seek treatment for their tremor. Then, we propose seven different areas within which mobile and wearable technology may improve the clinical management of ET and review the current state of research in these areas.

Transcutaneous Afferent Patterned Stimulation Therapy Reduces Hand Tremor for One Hour in Essential Tremor Patients

“…The former metric is a gold standard assessment for the field, but requires an expert rater, has limited inter-and intra-rater reliability (Stacy et al, 2007), and could be difficult to administer at home. There has been increasing interest in using mobile sensing technology to monitor tremor status, as sensor-based metrics may reduce subjectivity and variance in evaluating tremor severity and provide opportunities for remote monitoring of tremor status (e.g., Pulliam et al, 2014;Daneault, 2018). This study's outcome metric, tremor power, has been used previously as a measure of tremor severity (e.g., Elble et al, 2006;Daneault et al, 2012;Zheng et al, 2017).…”

OpenHealth: Open-Source Platform for Wearable Health Monitoring

“…1. Challenges of wearable health platforms and proposed strategies patients find wearable devices uncomfortable or burdensome and stop using them after some time [3]. Thus, the device should be able to operate autonomously with minimum human intervention.…”

“…In fact, a high volume of data can dilute its direct applicability [10]. Hence, sensors and algorithms should effectively extract relevant information for individualized patient treatment [3], [10]. We address this challenge through two mechanisms.…”

“…Wearable sensors and mobile health applications are emerging as attractive solutions to augment clinical treatment and enable telepathic diagnostics [3], [5], [6], [13]. Wearable technology allows for continuous monitoring of user movement in a free-living home environment.…”

“…Furthermore, it enables evaluating the prescribed therapy on an individual basis [8], [10], [11]. Similarly, wearable sensors and smartphones have shown promising results in the diagnosis of ET [3] and detecting seizures in epilepsy [13]. Studies have This article has been accepted for publication in a future of IEEE Design & Test of Computers c 20XX IEEE.…”