Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive movement disorder caused by the death of dopamine-producing cells in the midbrain. There is a need for frequent symptom assessment, since the treatment needs to be individualized as the disease progresses. The aim of this paper was to verify and further investigate the clinimetric properties of an entropy-based method for measuring PD-related upper limb temporal irregularities during spiral drawing tasks. More specifically, properties of a temporal irregularity score (TIS) for patients at different stages of PD, and medication time points were investigated. Nineteen PD patients and 22 healthy controls performed repeated spiral drawing tasks on a smartphone. Patients performed the tests before a single levodopa dose and at specific time intervals after the dose was given. Three movement disorder specialists rated videos of the patients based on the unified PD rating scale (UPDRS) and the Dyskinesia scale. Differences in mean TIS between the groups of patients and healthy subjects were assessed. Test-retest reliability of the TIS was measured. The ability of TIS to detect changes from baseline (before medication) to later time points was investigated. Correlations between TIS and clinical rating scores were assessed. The mean TIS was significantly different between healthy subjects and patients in advanced groups (p-value = 0.02). Test-retest reliability of TIS was good with Intra-class Correlation Coefficient of 0.81. When assessing changes in relation to treatment, TIS contained some information to capture changes from Off to On and wearing off effects. However, the correlations between TIS and clinical scores (UPDRS and Dyskinesia) were weak. TIS was able to differentiate spiral drawings drawn by patients in an advanced stage from those drawn by healthy subjects, and TIS had good test-retest reliability. TIS was somewhat responsive to single-dose levodopa treatment. Since TIS is an upper limb high-frequency-based measure, it cannot be detected during clinical assessment.

The objective of this paper was to develop and evaluate clinimetric properties of a method for measuring Parkinson's disease (PD)-related temporal irregularities using digital spiral analysis. In total, 108 (98 patients in different stages of PD and 10 healthy elderly subjects) performed repeated spiral drawing tasks in their home environments using a touch screen device. A score was developed for representing the amount of temporal irregularity during spiral drawing tasks, using Approximate Entropy (ApEn) technique. In addition, two previously published spiral scoring methods were adapted and their scores were analyzed. The mean temporal irregularity score differed significantly between healthy elderly subjects and advanced PD patients (P<;0.005). The ApEn-based method had a better responsiveness and test-retest reliability when compared to the other two methods. In contrast to the other methods, the mean scores of the ApEn-based method improved significantly during a 3 year clinical study, indicating a possible impact of pathological basal ganglia oscillations in temporal control during spiral drawing tasks. In conclusion, the ApEn-based method could be used for differentiating between patients in different stages of PD and healthy subjects. The responsiveness and test-retest reliability were good for the ApEn-based method indicating that this method is useful for measuring upper limb temporal irregularity at a micro-level.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the feasibility of using the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) method to measure motor states in advanced Parkinson’s disease (PD). Data were collected from 19 PD patients who experimented leg agility motor tests with motion sensors on their ankles once before and multiple times after an administration of 150% of their normal daily dose of medication. Experiments of 22 healthy controls were included. Three movement disorder specialists rated the motor states of the patients according to Treatment Response Scale (TRS) using recorded videos of the experiments. A DTW-based motor state distance score (DDS) was constructed using the acceleration and gyroscope signals collected during leg agility motor tests. Mean DDS showed similar trends to mean TRS scores across the test occasions. Mean DDS was able to differentiate between PD patients at Off and On motor states. DDS was able to classify the motor state changes with good accuracy (82%). The PD patients who showed more response to medication were selected using the TRS scale, and the most related DTW-based features to their TRS scores were investigated. There were individual DTW-based features identified for each patient. In conclusion, the DTW method can provide information about motor states of advanced PD patients which can be used in the development of methods for automatic motor scoring of PD.

Design choices related to development of datadriven models significantly impact or degrade predictive performance of the models. One of the essential steps during development and evaluation of such models is the choice of feature selection and dimension reduction techniques. That is imperative especially in cases dealing with multimodal data gathered from different sources. In this paper, we will investigate the behavior of Partial Least Squares (PLS) regression for dimension reduction and prediction of motor states of Parkinson's disease (PD) patients, using upper limb motor data gathered by means of a smartphone. The results in terms of correlations between smartphone-based and clinician-derived scores were compared to a previous study using the same data where principal component analysis (PCA) and support vector machines (SVM) were used. The findings from this study show that PLS is superior in terms of prediction performance of motor states in PD than combining PCA and SVM. This indicates that PLS could be considered as a useful methodology in problems where data-driven analysis is needed.