Wearable Devices Effective in Tracking Parkinson’s Disease Progression: Study

A recent study published in the npj Parkinson’s Disease journal found digital measures from wearable devices to provide objective and sensitive real-world indicators of Parkinson's disease (PD) progression. Despite the scarcity of multicenter longitudinal studies on this topic, this research demonstrated significant differences in baseline gait, tremor, finger tapping and speech assessments between individuals with early, untreated PD and age-matched controls. 

This research utilized a generalized additive model to flexibly analyze at-home data collected from commercially available smartwatches, smartphones and research-grade wearable sensors. The study included a total of 82 individuals with early, untreated PD and 50 age-matched controls with data collected until the participants began medication for PD.

The key findings over the 12-month period include significant declines in several gait measures, an increase in daily tremor proportion, modest changes in speech and minimal changes in psychomotor function. Also, as measured by smartwatches during in-clinic visits, the average arm swing decreased from 25.9 degrees at baseline to 19.9 degrees after one year that highlighted a marked decline in motor function (P=0.004).

The proportion of awake time individuals with early PD underwent tremor rose from 19.3% to 25.6% which underlined the progressive nature of the disease (P<0.001). Also, the number of steps taken per day decreased from an average of 3052 steps to 2331 steps. However, this analysis was limited to 10 participants due to the exclusion of the individuals who started PD medications and lost data.

The changes in these digital measures over 12 months were generally more pronounced than changes in individual items on the Movement Disorder Society—Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS), despite not greater than the change in the overall scale. This suggests that digital measures might offer a more sensitive means of tracking disease progression than traditional clinical scales.

The study highlighted the potential of digital measures which were derived from widely available smart devices in assessing the efficacy of therapeutics in early PD. The successful implementation of these measures in future clinical trials will require improvements in study conduct regarding data capture. As the technology and methods improve, these digital measures could become important components in clinical trials that could offer more precise and real-time understanding of disease dynamics.

Source:

Adams, J. L., Kangarloo, T., Gong, Y., Khachadourian, V., Tracey, B., Volfson, D., Latzman, R. D., Cosman, J., Edgerton, J., Anderson, D., Best, A., Kostrzebski, M. A., Auinger, P., Wilmot, P., Pohlson, Y., Jensen-Roberts, S., Müller, M. L. T. M., Stephenson, D., … Dorsey, E. R. (2024). Using a smartwatch and smartphone to assess early Parkinson’s disease in the WATCH-PD study over 12 months. In npj Parkinson’s Disease (Vol. 10, Issue 1). Springer Science and Business Media LLC. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41531-024-00721-2