1. Shyamal Patel, Bor-rong Chen, Thomas Buckley, Romona Rednic, Doug McClure, Daniel Tarsy, Ludy Shih, Jennifer Dy, Matt Welsh, Paolo Bonato 32 nd Annual International Conference of the IEEE EMBS

2.  Parkinson’s Disease is the most common disorder of movement, affecting about 3% of the population over the age of 65 years and more than 500,000 US residents.

3.  With current and on-going advances in sensor technology it becomes possible to envision an unobtrusive system for monitoring human health on a more continuous basis.  This paper presents the development of a general purpose remote monitoring system that can be used for home monitoring of patients with different conditions.

4.  It explored the use of wearable sensors to capture movement features that are associated with changes in the severity of motor fluctuations as they occur during the intervals between medication dosages.  It used 8 accelerometers on the upper and lower limbs to monitor patients while they performed a set of standardized motor tasks from the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS).

5.  There are several challenges associated with monitoring patients in home.  Sensor Network  Data Security  Clinician-Patient Interaction

6.  A typical wireless body network (BSN) consists of several miniature sensors with limited resources such as storage, bandwidth, processing power and battery capacity.  One of the key challenges of a BSN is to efficiently manage available resources so that high data quality is maintained while achieving long battery life.

8.  Interaction between patients and clinicians is critical to the success of a home monitoring application.  The requirements could range from simple video conferencing to real-time access to the sensor data.  Appropriate data processing procedures must be available to derive clinically-relevant information from the analysis of wearable sensor data.

9.  The implemented home-monitoring system involves software services running at three tiers: central portal server, patient’s hosts, and clinician’s hosts.  To ensure both data security and high availability of the remote health monitoring service, a well-provisioned central portal server provides a secure and reliable central location for coordinating real-time data collection and video services.

11.  It developed the wireless BSN platform called Mercury.  It supports long-term longitudinal data collections on patients in the hospital and home settings and to overcome the core challenges of long battery lifetime and high data fidelity for long-term studies where patients wear sensors continuously 12 to 18 hours a day.

14.  It presented shows that a home-monitoring system that leverages wireless, wearable sensor technology and a web- based application can be relied upon to gather clinically relevant information for the management of patients with late stage PD.  The system has the potential to simplify the process of monitoring the effectiveness of the medication regimen and of titrating medications when deemed necessary.