Parkinson’s Disease Management via Wearable Sensors: A Systematic Review

Wearable technology has played an essential role in the Mobile Health (mHealth) sector for diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation of numerous diseases and disorders. One such neuro-degenerative disorder is Parkinson’s Disease (PD). It is categorized by motor symptoms that affect a patient’s motor skills and non-motor symptoms that affect the general health of a PD patient. The quality of life of a patient with PD is highly compromised. To date, there is no cure for the disease, but early intervention and assistive care can help a PD patient to perform daily activities with considerable ease. Many research works in PD management discuss the challenges that healthcare professionals face in the early detection and management of this disease. Sensor devices have been promising to overcome these challenges to a certain degree because of the low cost and accuracy in measurement, yielding precise conclusive results to detect, monitor, and manage PD. This paper presents a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) that provides an in-depth analysis of the PD symptoms, Motor and Non-Motor Symptoms (NMS), the current diagnosis and management techniques used and their efficacy. The paper also highlights the work of various researchers in wearable sensors and their proposals to improve the quality of life of a PD patient by diagnosing, monitoring, and managing PD symptoms remotely via wearable sensors. Another area of focus is commercially available wearables for PD management and a few promising works in progress. This paper will be beneficial for future researchers to identify existing gaps and provide the clinicians better insight into the disease progression, and avoid complications. This paper analyzes around 50+ articles from 2016 to 2021 and concludes that there is still much room for improvement in wearables for PD management during the research process. While much work has been attributed to PD Motor Symptom management, there is little focus on the management of PD NMS via wearable sensors. Furthermore, this paper also presents future work for PD management.