Using a Smartwatch and Smartphone to Assess Early Parkinson’s Disease in the WATCH-PD Study – 12-month results

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Abstract Digital measures may provide objective, sensitive, real-world measures of disease progression in Parkinson’s disease (PD). However, multi-center longitudinal assessments of such measures are few. We recently demonstrated that baseline assessments of gait, tremor, finger tapping, and speech from a commercially available smartwatch, smartphone, and research-grade wearable sensors differed significantly between 82 individuals with early, untreated PD and 50 age-matched controls. Here, we evaluated the longitudinal change in these assessments over 12 months in a multi-center observational study using a generalized additive model, which permitted flexible modeling of at-home data. All measurements were included until participants started medications for PD. Over one year, individuals with early PD experienced significant declines in several measures of gait, an increase in the proportion of day with tremor, modest changes in speech, and few changes in psychomotor function. As measured by the smartwatch, the average (SD) arm swing in clinic decreased from 25.9 (15.4) degrees at baseline to 19.9 degrees (13.7) at month 12 (p=0.004). The proportion of awake time an individual with early PD had tremor increased from 19.3% (18.0%) to 25.6% (21.4%; p

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