Motion Sensors to Assess and Monitor Medical and Surgical Management of Parkinson Disease

Patients with Parkinson disease (PD) often suffer from a resting tremor, bradykinesia, rigidity, postural instability, and gait difficulty. Determining a patient's candidacy for deep-brain stimulation (DBS) surgery and tracking their clinical response postoperatively requires that the frequency, duration, and severity of these symptoms be characterized in detail. Conventional means of assessing these symptoms, however, rely heavily on patient self-reporting, which often fails to provide the necessary level of detail. Wearable accelerometers are a novel tool that can detect and objectively characterize these movement abnormalities in both the clinical setting and the patient's home environment. In this article, we review the role of accelerometers in surgical candidate selection, recording and predicting falls, recording and predicting freezing of gait, evaluating surgical outcomes, and evaluating postoperative recovery and in altering DBS settings. Although accelerometry has yet to make it into the mainstream clinic, there is great promise for this technology in monitoring Parkinson patients.