Insights into Pharmacotherapy Management for Parkinson's Disease Patients Using Wearables Activity Data

We investigate what supervised classification models using clinical and wearables data are best suited to address two important questions about the management of Parkinson's Disease (PD) patients: 1) does a PD patient require pharmacotherapy or not, and 2) whether therapies are having an effect. Currently, patient management is suboptimal due to using subjective patient reported episodes to answer these questions.

Clinical and real environment sensor data (memory, tapping, walking) was provided by the mPower study (6805 participants). From the data, we derived relevant clinical scenarios: S1) before vs. after initiating pharmacotherapy, and S2) before vs. after taking medication. For each scenario we designed and tested 6 methods of supervised classification. Precision, Accuracy and Area Under the Curve (AUC) were computed using 10-fold cross-validation.

The best classification models were: S1) Decision Trees on Tapping activity data (AUC 0.95, 95% CI 0.05); and S2) K-Nearest Neighbours on Gait data (mean AUC 0.70, 95% CI 0.07, 46% participants with AUC > 0.70).

Automatic patient classification based on sensor activity data can objectively inform PD medication management, with significant potential for improving patient care.