´sHaKe_n_SCALE´: A measurement system of motor characteristics of Parkinson´s Disease

Parkinson´s Disease (PD) is a global health problem that is degenerative in nature and millions of people around the world are affected. Motor movements are severely affected by this disease and therefore analyzing these have been the primary steps in diagnosing the disease, albeit non-motor symptoms like depression etc. are equally important too. Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) can be a very suitable way of sensing these motor movements. ´Arduino´ is a popular resource that provide necessary setup - development board, coding resources, etc. for building IMU based applications. We have therefore prototyped a system using Arduino board and an IMU (with 3 axes accelerometer, gyroscope), signal processing software and Graphical User Interface (GUI) in MATLAB to measure the different characteristics of different types of motor movements. Characteristics associated to tremor/postural movements, gait, pronation-supination and finger tapping are measured as these are the standard measurements recommended by the UPDRS guidelines. A report is generated based on the collected data which can also be emailed. The testing and validation approach is also reported. The results are quite accurate and are included in the later section.