Evaluation of Parkinsonian patients using pursuit manual tracking of ternary targets

Quantitative techniques for the assessment of Parkinson´s disease are needed to assist the commonly used subjective clinical methods. The authors propose the use of input-output data, collected from Parkinsonians during pursuit manual tracking of one-dimensional random ternary targets, to estimate the parameters of an autoregressive moving-average (ARMA) model. Comparison of the estimated parameters for each patient before and after medication to the average parameters from control subjects showed significantly different results for three patients. One patient who had very mild clinical symptoms failed to show significant differences, suggesting that the technique may be able to separate the less severely from the more severely impaired patients. Drug intake did not affect the patients´ response delay, which was higher than that of the controls.<>