Tracking Parkinson’s Disease Symptoms with Mobile Apps

Symptoms of Parkinson's disease vary from person to person. Smartphone apps can document their progression. Here’s what you should know.

As many as one million people in the U.S. live with Parkinson's disease, and nearly 90,000 Americans are diagnosed with th chronic movement disorder each year, according to the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation.

The disease evolves over time, sometimes confusingly. But with smartphone apps, patients can track their symptoms and give their healthcare team more information to help with their treatment.

Parkinson’s patients usually see their doctor or nurse a few times a year to have their symptoms assessed. Tracking is especially important because the disease affects people differently. For some, it progresses quickly. In other people, only one side of the body suffers symptoms or the symptoms may worsen slowly.

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Tremors — when your hands, arms, legs, jaw, or face tremble — are often the primary symptom of Parkinson’s disease. They can interfere with daily activities like dressing and eating. Tremors, however, may be manageable with medication. Exercise and physical therapy can help, too.

Slow movement, impaired balance, and dyskinesias — involuntary writhing movements — are other movement symptoms.

Tracking symptoms

If you have an Apple Watch, which automatically captures tremors and dyskinesias, you can allow it to send detailed information to your neurologist through the StrivePD app. StrivePD also enables you to:

• Log symptoms manually
• Track what makes you feel better or worse
• Set medication reminders
• Learn from patterns in your activity
• Share your reports with your healthcare team

Patient Point of Care, a similar product, works on iPhones and iPads. So does APDA Symptom Tracker, from the American Parkinson Disease Association. StudyMyTremor, for iPhones, tracks tremors.

Beyond tracking symptoms, you can use your phone for other purposes to help you manage the disease.

9zest is a free app providing exercise plans from licensed therapists for Parkinson’s patients, with performance tracking.  CogniFit, also free, is a games, tests, and puzzles app, including a program for people with Parkinson’s. Parkinson’s Social Network is a free iPhone app for socializing that allows users to post updates and photos.   

What’s next?

Look out for cloudUPDRS, developed by researchers at Birkbeck at the University of London and currently in testing. It can analyze tremors, gait, and tapping performance to measure — in four minutes or fewer — whether Parkinson’s disease symptoms are increasing or decreasing.

The app combines smartphone technology with a cloud-based data analytics service. You can register here to learn when the app is released to the public.

In the cloudUPDRS system, your smartphone records the details of movement as you perform a series of simple actions, using your arms and legs individually. For instance, tapping the screen assesses bradykinesia (slowness of movement), and placing the phone on your knee assesses tremors.

The app then uploads the measurements to the cloudUPDRS analytics server, which uses high-tech analytics to calculate a score in the Universal Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale.

The results are then shared with your doctor. When you arrive at a clinic, your doctor may have analyzed the data in advance and might not need to spend as much time evaluating them, focusing instead on side effects and treatment.

“More regular assessments of disease progression mean that patients receive more consistent and reliable care, and detailed and automated patient analytics permit the early identification of problems such as medication side effects,” said George Roussos, PhD, the research lead in computing technology for the app development.

In addition, the app allows patients to be involved directly in their care because they can help document how nutrition and physical therapy may help their symptoms, Roussos added.

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