The project's goal is to develop a web and mobile application for timely detection and monitoring of Parkinson's disease (PD) and some other tremors. The application will be based on spirography and will include an expert system enabling automatic diagnostics. Thus it will be able to encourage potential patients to see the doctor in the early stage of the disease leading to timely start of the treatment and the improvement of the quality of life associated with the treatment.
PB is currently not curable, however the treatment can ease the symptoms and improve the quality of patients life. The latest research also suggests that the start of the treatment in the early motoric phase with l-dopa or MAO-B inhibitors can slow down the progress of the disease. Since PB is a chronic disease its efficient monitoring is very important. Early detection of PB is also beneficial from the scientific point of view, since currently its early phase biological markers are not well known.
The tremor is one of PB's main symptoms. The spirography is a technique for quantitative assessment of the tremors: on the basis of a drawn spiral several parameters are calculated, and these parameters are then employed by the expert system to differentiate between different tremor types and to perform automatic diagnostics. In this way, the application is able to detect not only PB, but also some other types of tremor, e.g. essential tremor.
The application offers a free possibility of self-diagnosis to the whole population using the smart phones. We envision that this will encourage many patients to see the doctor at a much earlier phase of the disease. We also envision the web application as a cheap possibility of diagnostics in primary health centres, e.g. as part of routine check-ups.