A Textile Embedded Wearable Device for Movement Disorders Quantification

• Main Authors: Oliveira, Ana, Dias, Duarte, Lopes, Elodie Murias, do Carmo Vilas-Boas, Maria, Silva Cunha, Joao Paulo
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1558-4615; 2694-0604
• DOI: 10.1109/EMBC44109.2020.9175772

Wearable devices have been showing promising results in a large range of applications: since industry, to entertainment and, in particular, healthcare. In the scope of movement disorders, wearable devices are being widely implemented for motor symptoms objective assessment. Currently, clinicians evaluate patients' motor symptoms resorting to subjective scales and visual perception, such as in Parkinson's Disease. The possibility to make use of wearable devices to quantify this disorder motor symptoms would bring an accurate follow-up on the disease progression, leading to more efficient treatments.Here we present a novel textile embedded low-power wearable device capable to be used in any scenario of movement disorders assessment due to its seamless, comfort and versatility. Regarding our research, it has already improved the setup of a wrist rigidity quantification system for Parkinson's Disease patients: the iHandU system. The wearable comprises a hardware sensing unit integrated in a textile band with an innovative design assuring higher comfort and easiness-to-use in movement disorders assessment. It enables to collect inertial data (9-axis) and has the possibility to integrate two analog sensors. A web platform was developed for data reading, visualization and recording. To ensure inertial data reliability, validation tests for the accelerometer and gyroscope sensors were conducted by comparison with its theoretical behavior, obtaining very good results.