Measuring Parkinson’s disease motor symptoms with smartphone-based drawing tasks

In Parkinson’s disease (PD), patients’ motor functionalities are measured by various tests. Spiral drawing is one of the proven techniques for assessing the severity of PD motor symptoms. Commonly the test is performed with pen and paper, with the following visual observation by a clinician. This paper describes the implementation of the digitized version of the spiral drawing test for Android devices. Moreover, the application extends the spiral test and utilizes square-shape drawing accordingly. This artifact was tested in a trial with 8 PD patients and 6 age matching controls. The results have shown the observable difference in performance between PD and non-PD users in drawing accuracy and speed.