Objective: To investigate the continuous and objective assessment of motor symptom severity in Parkinson’s Disease (PD) in everyday life.

Background: Treatment adjustments in PD patients are often based on clinical evaluation at single time points as well as patients’ descriptions of symptom severity in everyday life. Since motor fluctuations are a major component of PD symptoms and clinical settings differ from patients’ usual environments, relying on clinical evaluations may not be sufficient. To date, the gold standard to assess real-life motor fluctuations is the documentation within a symptom diary. Such diaries are not only highly subjective but require well-educated and highly adherent patients to provide reliable results. To address these limitations, wearable accelerometers have the potential to be a reliable and objective diagnostic method to assess motor symptoms. Previous research has shown that most patients prefer wearing sensors over completing symptom diaries [1]. To validate the classification of motor symptoms from wearable accelerometery however, large datasets of simultaneous sensor data and motor diaries are needed.

Method: 65 PD patients wore bilateral wrist-worn 3-axis-accelerometers for up to 1 week under both stationary and ambulatory conditions. Simultaneously, patients filled out symptom diaries, regarding their kinetic state, tremor, Freezing of gait, potential falls, and the exact times of Parkinson-related medication intake. Additional clinical data e.g., medication intake, UPDRS scores, and demographic variables were retrospectively included from patient files. Data were thoroughly screened for missing data entries and plausibility and will be released via an open science online platform.

Results: We provide a well-described dataset of more than 60 PD patients consisting of more than 365 days of simultaneous accelerometery and motor diary data.

Conclusion: This dataset serves as a basis for the development and validation of accelerometery‑based approaches to assess motor symptoms and fluctuations in PD research. We demonstrate that accelerometers enable the objective and continuous evaluation of motor symptom severity in PD in different settings. Thus, wearable accelerometery can contribute to improving patient care by completing the picture of real-life motor symptom control in patients with PD and hereby assist clinical decision-making.

References: [1] Fisher, J.M., et. al., Body-worn sensors in Parkinson’s Disease: Evaluating their acceptability to patients., Telemed J E Health, 2016 Jan; 22(1):63-69.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/cops-continuous-observation-of-parkinsonian-symptoms-a-prospective-data-acquisition-study-using-wearable-accelerometery/