Emerging wearable technologies for multisystem monitoring and treatment of Parkinson's disease: a narrative review

Yasmine M Kehnemouyi; Todd P Coleman; Peter A Tass

doi:10.3389/fnetp.2024.1354211

Emerging wearable technologies for multisystem monitoring and treatment of Parkinson's disease: a narrative review

Front Netw Physiol. 2024 Feb 13:4:1354211. doi: 10.3389/fnetp.2024.1354211. eCollection 2024.

Authors

Yasmine M Kehnemouyi^{1

2}, Todd P Coleman², Peter A Tass¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Neurosurgery, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, United States.
² Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University School of Engineering, Stanford, CA, United States.

Abstract

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a chronic movement disorder characterized by a variety of motor and nonmotor comorbidities, including cognitive impairment, gastrointestinal (GI) dysfunction, and autonomic/sleep disturbances. Symptoms typically fluctuate with different settings and environmental factors and thus need to be consistently monitored. Current methods, however, rely on infrequent rating scales performed in clinic. The advent of wearable technologies presents a new avenue to track objective measures of PD comorbidities longitudinally and more frequently. This narrative review discusses and proposes emerging wearable technologies that can monitor manifestations of motor, cognitive, GI, and autonomic/sleep comorbidities throughout the daily lives of PD individuals. This can provide more wholistic insight into real-time physiological versus pathological function with the potential to better assess treatments during clinical trials and allow physicians to optimize treatment regimens. Additionally, this narrative review briefly examines novel applications of wearables as therapy for PD patients.

Keywords: Parkinson’s disease; autonomic; cognition; gastrointestinal; monitoring; motor; sleep; wearable technologies.

Publication types

Review

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. PAT gratefully acknowledges funding support by the Vibrotactile Therapy Research Fund, by the John A. Blume Foundation, by the Alda Parkinson’s Research Fund, by the Ravi Neuro Research Fund, and by the Foundation for OCD Research (New Venture Fund 011665-2020-08-01, url: https://www.ffor.org/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.