Understanding Wearing-Off Symptoms in Parkinson's Disease Patients using Wrist-Worn Fitness Tracker and a Smartphone.

Parkinson's disease (PD) patients experience motor and non-motor symptoms, which affect their quality of life (QoL). Despite the use of Levodopa treatment to alleviate these symptoms, the "wearing-off phenomenon" (WO) occurs, and symptoms resurface. Thus, PD patients have to closely monitor and report their symptoms, the effects, and the duration of levodopa treatment to their doctors for a customized treatment. Towards predicting the WO among PD patients, this paper aims to understand the relationship between the WO symptoms and the collected fitness tracker data using a fitness tracker and a smartphone application. Our preliminary study among two patients within a 30-day collection period showed that PD patients experience WO symptoms with a unique relationship and association with fitness tracker datasets. The participant's sleep duration was negatively correlated with sharp pain and tremors. On the other hand, the other participant's total sleep duration was positively correlated with symptoms. Our analysis also showed that the time elapsed since the last medicine intake was a strong predictor of WO, aside from sleep duration and step count. These results suggest the possibility of using the fitness tracker dataset to estimate the WO among PD patients. The results would be helpful in the management of WO and PD in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]