Abstract
Mortality rate increases exponentially with people’s age. They gather age-related diseases and become ‘frail’, i.e. increasingly vulnerable to various stressors. The gold standard to evaluate the severity of upper limb motor symptoms is to use the UPDRS-part III (motor examination) yet it is proven that simple tests of manual dexterity can identify persons at high risk for neurodegenerative diseases.
The aim of this study is to evaluate a novel, objective, observer-independent and assistance-independent tablet device-based method which could be helpful in the upper limb function diagnostics designed for telemedicine technology and frailty assessment. The test employs a tablet and a fixed-height obstacle. The patient is required to move his/her hand above the obstacle and touch the round fields displayed on the tablet. The test is performed for 30 s, as fast as possible, using pointing finger of the dominating hand. Several parameters are registered using the tablet.
In the study, the test is evaluated in the group inpatients of geriatric hospital separated into Frail (14 patients) and Control (14 patients) groups. The patients in the Control group are featuring (Mann-Whitney U-test, p-value < 0.05) more correct touches (\(23.4\pm 8.2\) vs. \(17.1\pm 12.4\)) than the members of the Frail group. The reaction time and mean time between touches in Control group is shorter than in the Frail group (respectively Mann-Whitney U-test and Student’s t-test; p-value < 0.05).
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Seiffert, P. et al. (2019). Mobile Test of Manual Dexterity in the Diagnostics of Frail Geriatric Patients – Pilot Study. In: Tkacz, E., Gzik, M., Paszenda, Z., Piętka, E. (eds) Innovations in Biomedical Engineering. IBE 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 925. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15472-1_6
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