Telemonitoring and telerehabilitation of patients with Parkinson's disease: Health technology assessment of a novel wearable step counter

Step counting is an important index of motion in telemonitoring. One of the most diffused wearable systems, designed for this purpose, is the pedometer. The accuracy of commercial pedometers has been reported in the literature. Several limits have been found in many commercial systems both in healthy subjects and in people with disabilities. Furthermore, commercial pedometers lack interoperability. This paper introduces a new wearable system for step counting for telemonitoring applications. This system is based on a wearable device with a force-sensing resistor. It is affixed on the gastrocnemius muscle for monitoring muscular expansion correlated with the gait. The data exchange is assured by the XTR-434H (Aurel, FC, Italy) telemetric system. The proposed gastrocnemius expansion measurement unit (GEMU) was tested on 5 subjects with Parkinson's disease at Level 3 of the Tinetti test of unbalance. Ten repetitions of 500 steps with three different speeds (fast, slow, and normal) were performed. The mean error was < 0.5%. Results also showed that GEMU performed better than an accelerometer unit (considered in the literature the best solution for this disability). The study showed that GEMU had a high performance in subjects with Parkinson's disease, causing a high degree of unbalance that confounded motion style. The next phase will be the optimization of GEMU for long-term medical applications at the patient's home.