Trends and New Advances on Wearable and Mobile Technologies for Parkinson's Disease Monitoring and Assessment

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder after Alzheimer’s disease and is expected to impose an increasing social and economic burden on society in the coming decades. The major motor disturbances in PD are bradykinesia (i.e., slowness of movement), hypokinesia (decreased movement amplitude), resting tremors, rigidity, and postural instability. In the last decades, many initiatives have been carried out addressing the monitoring, assessing and managing of the full range of PD symptoms through novel innovative solutions while not hampering the patient's daily activities. Such solutions are aimed at detecting and quantifying the severity of the symptoms, as well as to correlate their progress and finally, to enable clinicians to manage more efficiently PD patients by providing timely indications on the effectiveness of the therapy and suggestions on therapy changes.

Jorge Cancela received the B.S. in Telecommunications Engineering and the M.Sc. degree in Telemedicine and Biomedical Engineering from Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain, in 2009. Currently he is PhD candidate at Campus de Excelencia Internacional CEI Moncloa, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (UPM) and Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM). He works as Research Engineer at the Life Supporting Technologies group at UPM where he has been involved in several R&D projects dealing with information and communication technologies (ICT) in the areas of eHealth and mHealth such as PERFORM, MOSAIC, PD_manager and SMART4MD. He received a merit prize at the Young Investigator Award 2015 from the International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering and he was one the finalists on the IDEA2 Program 2015 of the Madrid-MIT M+Visión Consortium.