A Systematic Survey of Research Trends in Technology Usage for Parkinson’s Disease

Abstract

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurological disorder with complicated and disabling motor and non-motor symptoms. The complexity of PD pathology is amplified due to its dependency on patient diaries and the neurologist’s subjective assessment of clinical scales. A significant amount of recent research has explored new cost-effective and subjective assessment methods pertaining to PD symptoms to address this challenge. This article analyzes the application areas and use of mobile and wearable technology in PD research using the PRISMA methodology. Based on the published papers, we identify four significant fields of research: diagnosis, prognosis and monitoring, predicting response to treatment, and rehabilitation. Between January 2008 and December 2021, 31,718 articles were published in four databases: PubMed Central, Science Direct, IEEE Xplore, and MDPI. After removing unrelated articles, duplicate entries, non-English publications, and other articles that did not fulfill the selection criteria, we manually investigated 1559 articles in this review. Most of the articles (45%) were published during a recent four-year stretch (2018–2021), and 19% of the articles were published in 2021 alone. This trend reflects the research community’s growing interest in assessing PD with wearable devices, particularly in the last four years of the period under study. We conclude that there is a substantial and steady growth in the use of mobile technology in the PD contexts. We share our automated script and the detailed results with the public, making the review reproducible for future publications.