Real-world performance evaluation of a telemonitoring system for Parkinson's disease symptom assessment

Parkinson's disease (PD) nurses constitute a reliable modality for appraising the motor status of patients, second only to expert neurologists. Consequently, employing PD nurses for the assessment of medical device performance is appreciated to be a fundamental benchmark in the field.

To evaluate the precision of a telemonitoring device in measuring motor symptoms when utilized at patient's home during everyday life conditions.

To ascertain the extent of correlation between device-reported outcomes and PD nurse assessments and the precision with which the device detects symptoms such as gait impairment, rest tremor, bradykinesia, and the presence of OFF, a total of 34 evaluations were conducted by a PD nurse at the patients' home, each lasting 3 h.

A robust correlation was noted for all three symptoms when analyzed at both 30-minute intervals and cumulatively over the entire 3-hour duration with Pearson's r range 0.68-0.76 and 0.83-0.90 respectively. Furthermore, substantial agreement was observed for the identification of the presence of all three symptoms with Cohen's kappa range from 0.61 to 0.71 across all 30-minute evaluations. Finally, the device demonstrates high accuracy in detecting rest tremor (90%), bradykinesia (89%), gait impairment (95%) and OFF state (94%).

This study evaluates for the first time the performance of a remote monitoring device, unobtrusively, at patients familiar environment, with a PD nurse present in non-scripted scenarios. The device exhibited commendable efficacy in the accurate detection of PD symptoms and state.