Monitoring Parkinson's Symptoms at Home
From: Wireless Design Magazine - 10/06/2016
By: Helen Knight

In a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers at MIT
and elsewhere describe a technique they have developed to monitor Parkinson’s
disease progression as patients interact with a computer keyboard.

In this way the technique, which is based on technology originally developed
to replace computer passwords, allows Parkinson's signs to be monitored as
people perform ordinary tasks such as typing emails or updating their
Facebook status, according to Luca Giancardo, a former Catalyst Fellow in the
Madrid-MIT M+Vision Consortium in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at
MIT, and one of the paper’s lead authors.

Researchers set out to investigate whether keystroke dynamics, a technique
used to identify a computer user by the time they take to press down and
release each key -  typically around 100 milliseconds -  could be used to
monitor the motor effects of Parkinson's disease in the home.

When they analyzed the typing data, they found a significant variation in the
timing of each press and release in patients with early stage Parkinson’s
disease, while in the healthy control group this was much more uniform.

The system can be installed as software on a standard computer, or added to
the hardware of a device, or even deployed on a webpage.

Read the entire article at:
https://www.wirelessdesignmag.com/news/2016/10/monitoring-parkinsons-symptoms-home
https://www.mdtmag.com/article/2016/10/monitoring-parkinsons-symptoms-home
http://news.mit.edu/2016/keyboard-monitoring-parkinsons-symptoms-1005

Links:
NeuroQWERTY
https://www.neuroqwerty.com/en/index.php

Luca Giancardo
http://linq.mit.edu/portfolio-item/luca-giancardo-phd

Alvaro Sanchez-Ferro
http://www.somoshmcinac.com/research-team-alvaro-sanchez-ferro