Assessment of Parkinson’s Disease Tremor and Correlation Analysis With Applied Signal Processing

Accurate measurement and assessment of Parkinson’s disease (PD) tremor is important for patients, clinicians, and researchers to track changes in disease progression and the effectiveness of therapeutic interventions. This study measured resting, postural, and kinetic tremor from patient’s most-affected hand with accelerometers and gyrometers, thus the linear and rotational motions in the x, y, z directions were obtained. Data were collected when patients were both ON and OFF their anti-PD medications. A bandpass filter was applied to extract raw tremor information and several signal processing algorithms were used to analyze the data in both time and frequency domains, including the correlations between motions at different directions. The results of medication effectiveness on PD tremor and the correlational analyses will be discussed.