Can gestures help detect motor impairments in early Parkinson disease stages

 Parkinson's disease is a degenerative disease that affects many elderly individuals. The disease affects nearly one million people in the U.S. alone and is found to be mostly in men and diagnosed as early as 50. One of the problems with Parkinson’s disease is that it is often diagnosed years after the actual onset of Parkinson’s disease starts to show. This can range from several reasons such as not having the equipment necessary to detect the small signs of Parkinson’s disease. When we see that Parkinson’s Disease can be a bigger problem for people when not diagnosed early this raises the question of how we can find an effective way to test for early-onset Parkinson’s disease. An article published in 2019 titled “What can gestures tell? Detecting motor impairments in early Parkinson’s from common touch gestural interactions” uses research with smartphones to prove that smartphones can be used as a tool to be able to detect early onset Parkinson’s disease. With a better understanding of how Gesture works and the research using smartphones, we can create better methods of early detection for the future.

              To better understand the work that smartphones can contribute we must first be able to understand what gestures are and what they can accomplish. Gestures are the spontaneous movement of hands to better communicate with others. Gestures can have several uses. For example, an article titled “Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding through a visual attention mechanism” shows how children can use gestures to better understand a story that is in a different language. Since children don’t have a good grasp of language in general, let alone one that is different from theirs, they found that by using gestures children were able to grasp more information about the different stories presented to them in their native language and a different language. Now that it is shown what gestures can do for learning this raises the question of how we can use something that we use every day to better understand and better diagnose diseases that affect the way we use our hands like Parkinson's disease.

              In an article titled “What can gestures tell? Detecting motor impairments in early Parkinson’s from common touch gestural interactions” They go into detail about how gestures can be used to diagnose Parkinson’s with the use of a smartphone. Since Parkinson’s is a muscular degenerative disease that affects the use of people’s hands, we can use this information when testing with a smartphone since the use of a smartphone requires you to use fine motor skills to be able to use the device. Through their research, they hypothesize that they can differentiate people with early stages of Parkinson’s disease from normal patients. For the experiment, they used four different types of touch gestures that are flick, drag, handwriting, and pinch. Each of these movements requires precise hand movements to be able to properly use the smartphone. They also use different features to get stronger results like path-based features, time-based features, pressure-based features, and IMU-based features. The participants had 2 groups, one group of 35 individuals who all showed early Parkinson’s disease and another group of 67 individuals for the control group with an average age between 62.7 and 64.8. The results of this research concluded that people with early Parkinson's disease showed less efficient finger trajectories and showed low voluntary movement.

              Through this research, we can use gestures to not just help people with learning and understanding. They are also able to be used to better understand the differences between early-onset Parkinson's disease and regular finger gestures. Not only that, but we are also able to use the current technology to create less cost-efficient techniques to better detect early Parkinson’s disease.

Zielinski, Natalia, and Elizabeth M Wakefield. “Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding through a Visual Attention Mechanism.” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 19 July 2021, escholarship.org/uc/item/63r5d3qq. 

Tian, Feng, et al. “What can gestures tell?” Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300313.