Creating the Next Digital Telemedicine Tool for Parkinson's Disease Management with AI

Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a neurological disease that progresses over time and causes severe motor symptoms. Therefore, treating PD requires constant patient monitoring, which may turn clinical practice overwhelming, preventing its practical implementation, and raising the need for patient monitoring outside the clinical setting. The iHandU system described in this paper fulfils this need by providing an objective way to quantify motor symptoms of PD in non-clinical settings. It integrates an innovative real-time assessment of the severity of motor symptoms based on signal processing and Machine Learning models that mimic the clinical severity classification scales used in practice and allows for a more continuous and personalized therapy planning and management by doctors, through the use of a web dashboard user-friendly interface. This system, recently tested at 5 patients' homes, has shown promising results as a PD patient management digital platform, reaching a usability score of 83.9% (A grade) based on the System Usability Scale (SUS). Such a level shows a strong alignment between user needs, expectations and functionalities. This study highlights the potential of the used system as a Patient Management Tool showing a case study from an ongoing clinical study. By giving additional information to the doctors with features beyond the semi-quantitative rating scales currently used, allowing a more optimized and continuous PD symptom management, it will be possible to advance PD management further.