Mobile health: assessment of upper limb motor function via a drawing test on a mobile device

This paper describes and compares experiences with two generations of devices that can acquire pen movement data from a drawing test. The first part of this work summarizes methods introduced earlier that analyze data acquired using a graphics tablet from healthy subjects and people with Parkinson's disease before and after surgery. These methods can discriminate groups of patients and can assess improvements after surgery. The second part of this work presents the implementation of analogous methods that estimate hand tremor and drawing smoothness on a commercially available mobile tablet. Both approaches and applications are compared, and differences in goals and in characteristics of these devices are enumerated.