A Smart Wearable Ring Device for Sensing Hand Tremor of Parkinson’s Patients

Abstract

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a very common neurodegenerative disease that occurs mostly in the elderly. There are many main clinical manifestations of PD, such as tremor, bradykinesia, muscle rigidity, etc. Based on the current research on PD, the accurate and convenient detection of early symptoms is the key to detect PD. With the development of microelectronic and sensor technology, it is much easier to measure the barely noticeable tremor in just one hand for the early detection of Parkinson’s disease. In this paper, we present a smart wearable device for detecting hand tremor, in which MPU6050 (MIDI Processing Unit) consisting of a 3-axis gyroscope and a 3-axis accelerometer is used to collect acceleration and angular velocity of fingers. By analyzing the time of specific finger movements, we successfully recognized the tremor signals with high accuracy. Meanwhile, with Bluetooth 4.0 (Bluetooth Low Energy, BLE) and networking terminal ability, tremor data can be transferred to a monitoring device in real time with extremely low energy consumption. The experimental results have shown that the proposed device (smart ring) is convenient for long-term tremor detection which is vital for early detection and treatment for Parkinson’s disease.