Feasibility of Developing an In-Home Parkinson’s Disease Early Diagnosing System

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive nervous system disorder that affects movement. Symptoms start gradually, where tremors are the most common, but the disorder also commonly causes stiffness or slowing of movement. Parkinson’s disease signs and symptoms can be different for everyone. Early signs may be mild and go unnoticed. Many of the symptoms are due to loss of neurons that produce a chemical messenger in the brain called dopamine. Early detection of the disease allows rapid intervention, which is important because in most cases it is not possible to recover from. It is only possible to slow down or better, to stop progression but not to reverse damage that has already incurred. Eye tremors are prevalent in PD illness and could be an initial warning for the neurodegenerative disorder. In the very early stages of the disease, these eye tremors are very small that make it impossible to be detected by naked eyes. We are proposing to use a new technology developed by MIT to generate motion magnification from recorded videos. The technology, called phase based video magnification, can be used for providing a convenient solution to detect ocular tremor. By capturing then analyzing and interpreting the results of recorded videos using smartphone’s camera, we can obtain a low-cost and widely available early diagnostic system. A prototype was developed and tested on healthy and diseased subjects with encouraging results.