Remote measurement and home monitoring of tremor.

ABSTRACT

The field of neurology has experienced a dramatic push towards providing care via telemedicine approaches, triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The remote monitoring of movement disorders, including tremor, provides a set of challenges compared to gold-standard in-clinic assessments, but also opens opportunities to assess patients' symptoms in a setting where it most matters, such as patients' homes, and during their daily life activities. A successful remote interaction with patients experiencing tremor is dependent on a seamless teleneurology interaction allowing for a high-quality medical history and physical examination. In addition to the clinical evaluation, tremor may be characterized and quantified remotely using transducer-based methods, which may be applying devices containing sensors to objectively and precisely capture tremor movements. This review aims to provide (Zheng et al., 2017 [1]) a practice-oriented overview of telemedicine basics, when it comes to the assessment of tremor, Powers et al. (2021) [2] an update of the most notable techniques and devices, and (Mari, 2021 [3]) an outlook into future opportunities and challenges, as well as and next steps towards seamless remote care of patient with tremor. In conclusion, teleneurology, propelled by the COVID-19 pandemic, has evolved into to a widely established method of physician-patient interaction, aided by technological advancement of remote assessment tools of tremor. However, as the technological, regulatory and reimbursement environment is increasingly adapting to serve the needs of telemedicine, the methods presented for remote measurement of tremor using devices are still largely experimental and largely limited to the research setting. This article is part of the Special Issue "Tremor" edited by Daniel D. Truong, Mark Hallett, and Aasef Shaikh.