More than 10 million people globally have Parkinson’s disease — a neurological condition that affects a person’s ability to move.
There is currently no cure for Parkinson’s disease. Early signs of Parkinson’s disease vary from person to person and may be difficult to diagnose. For this reason, scientists are constantly exploring ways to diagnose the condition in its earliest stages.
One such group of researchers hails from the University of Rochester Medical Center. In their new study, they report that everyday smartwatchesTrusted Source and smartphones — in this case, an Apple Watch paired with an app on an iPhone — could potentially be used to measure changes in Parkinson’s symptoms over time in people with early-stage Parkinson’s disease.
Tracking Parkinson’s with smartwatches
This research was done as part of a study called WATCH-PD, which included 82 adults with early, untreated Parkinson’s disease and 50 age-matched controls.
Scientists collected data from participants using three devices: research-grade wearable “Opal” sensorsTrusted Source, an Apple Watch 4 or 5, and an iPhone 10 or 11 with an application specifically for Parkinson’s disease called BrainBaseline.
According to lead study author Jamie Adams, MD, associate professor of neurology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, the Center for Health + Technology, the researchers chose to study smartwatches to monitor Parkinson’s disease progression because smartwatches and smartphones are accessible and user-friendly with many people already having these devices. Adams shared the following with Medical News Today
How does a smartwatch measure Parkinson’s symptoms?
During the study, participants were followed for 12 months and data was collected on how their early Parkinson’s disease symptoms changed over time.
The BrainBaseline iPhone app provided cognitive, speech, and psychomotorTrusted Source tasks to help test things like reading, speech, and fine motor skills.
“Many devices have the ability to collect similar data,” Adams explained when asked how the smartwatch and smartphone in their study worked.
“Some devices collect raw data that needs to be processed and analyzed by researchers after the collection to provide more meaningful measures like step counts or proportion of time with tremor. Other devices collect the raw data and also have applications that provide some measures. The Apple Watch has a movement disorders application that provides data on tremors and dyskinesias, which are symptoms experienced in Parkinson’s disease,” Adams continued.
This is not the first study to use a smartwatch or other wearable device for Parkinson’s disease.
A 2023 studyTrusted Source reported that smartwatches may help detect Parkinson’s disease up to seven years before symptoms appear. And a 2021 studyTrusted Source found that a smartwatch and smartphone monitoring system could capture changes and improvements in Parkinson’s disease symptoms when wearers received doctor-derived therapy changes.
Smartwatch detected Parkinson’s symptom changes
At the study’s conclusion, researchers found that participant data collected through a smartwatch detected symptoms of Parkinson’s, including significant declines in measures of gait, an increase in tremors, modest changes in speech, and decreases in arm swing.
“Our findings showed that the smartwatch and smartphone application were able to objectively detect changes in gait and tremor over one year in people with early Parkinson’s disease,” Adams explained.
“The early Parkinson’s population is of interest for potential disease-modifying therapies. However, the disease progresses slowly, and our traditional measures are episodic and subjective and may not reflect an individual’s true state. Digital measures, in addition to advances in machine learning and AI, are poised to help us detect subtle changes in progression and help determine whether therapies, which are desperately needed in Parkinson’s disease, are working,” she continued.
Next steps for smartwatches and Parkinson’s
Adams said digital measures must be sensitive to change and meaningful to people with the disease in order to be used as monitoring endpoints in clinical trials.
“A remote extension of this study using the smartwatch and smartphone application with remote visits has been generously funded by the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research and is underway,” she detailed.
“We will be analyzing the data for changes in the digital measures over three years and try to identify digital signals that are sensitive to or even predict medication initiation, and also conducting qualitative work to evaluate which measures are most meaningful to people with Parkinson’s and how that may change over time.”
“There is a lot of excitement for digital measures in Parkinson’s disease, but still much work to be done including continued algorithm development, refinement, and validation,” Adams added.
“This requires multi-stakeholder involvement, collaboration, and commitment including industry, academia, regulators, and most importantly, patients — this type of multi-stakeholder input has been present in WATCH-PD and is a key reason for the study’s success.”