Parkinson’s disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder in developed countries. In Spain alone, more than 150,000 people suffer it, and it is often detected long before old age: one in five affected in our country is under 50 years of age.
It is an incurable ailment, but there are treatments that improve the condition of patients. Managing them effectively requires continuous monitoring of disease status. And that is what allows a technique developed by Spanish specialists in collaboration with researchers from MIT. The method monitors the progression of Parkinson’s from the interaction of patients with a computer keyboard, and also allows an early diagnosis that is essential in the fight against this disease that affects the nervous system in the area responsible for coordinating activity , muscle tone and movements.
This technique identifies a user by the time it takes to press and release each key – typically around 100 milliseconds – and can be used to monitor the condition of a Parkinson’s patient without leaving home. It has been shown that in this way signs of impairment of motor functions are detected. It is enough for the patient to interact with the keyboard – updating Facebook, writing tweets and emails … – to draw conclusions.
Doctors Álvaro Sánchez-Ferro and José Obeso have coordinated the tests of this method, carried out in several Spanish hospitals. 42 patients with early-stage Parkinson’s disease and 43 healthy subjects were asked to write a text of their choice on a computer for periods of 10 to 15 minutes.
The computer had installed software designed to measure the press and release time of each key. The data analysis revealed large differences between the sick, while the healthy people had much more uniform times. The researchers, who have published their work in the journal Scientific Reports , indicate that this technique will be used to develop algorithms that detect symptoms of other motor or neurological disorders in addition to Parkinson’s.
The system can be installed as software or hardware, used to fill the gaps between neurologist visits, and perform continuous testing without travel. As Luca Giancardo, one of the authors of the work, says, “the possibility of monitoring patients in their daily lives will help doctors to set the necessary dose of medication and to develop new treatments.”
