Development of a wearable device for the early diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases

The progressive evolution of information and sensing technologies is giving pulse to the development of wearable mobile devices in search of life quality improvement. A relevant field of application is healthcare, with the development of wireless unobtrusive wearable solutions for the continuous remote health monitoring of patients. These wearable devices are particularly important for neurodegenerative diseases due to the possibility of early stage diagnoses through continuous monitoring to collect earlier significant data. Discovering specific symptoms and early defining medical treatments can delay, if not stop, the pathology progress whereas, once major symptoms like restricted or impaired mobility has appeared, the patients already underwent relevant and irreversible brain damage. The aim of this work is to show the development of the Neuroglass, a wearable smart glasses device for early stage diagnosis and monitoring of Parkinsonian-type neurodegenerative diseases. The designed frame is compliant to the standards and in order to embed the sensors to collect data from head and eyes movements since one of the early symptoms of Parkinson's disease has proven to be eye tremors. Preliminary laboratory tests, e.g. head accelerations measurements for different body movements, were carried out in order to choose properly the characteristics and positioning of the sensors; afterwards the device’s frame was designed by means of a 3D parametric CAD and built by additive manufacturing. The design was validated by first experimental test on monitoring eye movements and blinks.