An Ad-Hoc Networked Measurement Framework to Real-Time Monitoring of Neurodegenerative Diseases

Remote monitoring is crucial in different application fields and it becomes primary in case of healthcare issues. Neurodegenerative diseases, like Parkinson's disease, need to be constantly monitored to follow the pathology evolution and adapt the pharmacological treatments for the people suffering such a condition. Consequently, the availability of data concerning their state in daily life is helpful to prevent uninvestigated sudden worsening of health status and to promptly intervene in these cases. In this framework, the paper proposes a system to continuously monitor people with Parkinson's disease by means of wearable IMU devices and an ad-hoc networking system to make data available to medical doctor through a cloud platform in real-time. The proposed system is also capable to pre-process acquired data in order to present an easy-to-read prospectus to the specialists, making them able to take fast and accurate decisions. The data communication makes use of the MQTT paradigm and the gateway between wearable sensors and the cloud platform is represented by a Raspberry PI 4 device.