Empowering patients in self-management of parkinson's disease through cooperative ICT systems

The objective of this chapter is to demonstrate the technical feasibility and medical effectiveness of personalised services and care programmes for Parkinson's disease, based on the combination of mHealth applications, cooperative ICTs, cloud technologies and wearable integrated devices, which empower patients to manage their health and disease in cooperation with their formal and informal caregivers, and with professional medical staff across different care settings, such as hospital and home. The presented service revolves around the use of two wearable inertial sensors, i.e. SensFoot and SensHand, for measuring foot and hand performance in the MDS-UPDRS III motor exercises. The devices were tested in medical settings with eight patients, eight hyposmic subjects and eight healthy controls, and the results demonstrated that this approach allows quantitative metrics for objective evaluation to be measured, in order to identify pre-motor/pre-clinical diagnosis and to provide a complete service of tele-health with remote control provided by cloud technologies. © 2016, IGI Global. All rights reserved.