Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive neurological disorder where the brain can’t make enough dopamine to control movement properly. PD is the fastest-growing neurological disorder, and living with it brings many challenging symptoms.

The measures currently used to track how PD changes over time may not accurately reflect what people with PD experience day-to-day. Better measures could help treatments reach patients faster and improve care.

The edition of Tap into Research looks at a study exploring which characteristics of PD can be picked up using a smartphone and a smartwatch, and how these compare to the measures currently used.

How were smartphones and smartwatches used in the study?

This study shows the breadth of information that can be collected from people at home using smartphones and smartwatches.

An Apple Watch was used to measure arm swing and tremor.

An iPhone was used to measure:

• Gait and balance, with the phone placed in a pouch on the lower back.
• Cognitive function, and the relationship between cognitive processing and physical movement, via tasks on the BrainBaseline™ App, such as the Trail Making Test, and finger-tapping tests.
• Speech features, with recordings checked for pitch changes and voice jitters.
• Symptoms, tracked through a daily questionnaire.

What did the study find?

The study included 82 people with early, untreated PD and 50 people without PD. Many measurements from the smartwatch and smartphone differed between the two groups:

• Participants with PD had smaller arm swings and took fewer steps per minute.
• On the BrainBaseline™ App tests, finger tapping was slower in participants with PD, and those with PD performed worse on the Trail Making Test.
• For speech, the average pitch was lower in participants with PD, even when the standard speech test said their speech was “normal”.
• The speech features that best separated people with and without PD were different for men and women. For women, the most useful measure was how much time they spent pausing while talking. For men, it was the range of their pitch.

Why does this matter?

This study highlights the value of using smartphones and smartwatches in research, particularly as these devices can collect a wide range of metrics from people at home. However, this type of research also has challenges. In this study, some participants were missing data because device permissions were inadvertently turned off, which meant data could not be sent from participants to researchers.

In the future, these digital measures could help test new treatments in clinical trials. To make this work, people living with PD will need to help decide which digital measures matter most.

Read the paper: Using a smartwatch and smartphone to assess early Parkinson’s disease in the WATCH-PD study

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