Evaluation of smartphone usage in neurological pathologies diagnosis

Population ageing, i.e. the increase of the median age in the population, has become a pressing matter, due to a significant rise in health-care expenses, which, if not controlled, may destabilize welfare mechanisms. To face this problem, various approaches have already been presented in literature: some of these methods acquire pathology-relevant data using ad-hoc systems (i.e. sensor arrays), while others employs commercial devices, like wearable or smartphones; however, there are several issues that such systems must address, i.e. the meaningfulness of sensed data, or the wellness of the patients in the follow-up phase. The aim of this work is to propose a medical decision support system, specifically oriented to the acquisition of data related to neurological pathologies, whose final aim is to build an extended medical knowledge base, which will be used by skilled professionals in the diagnosis phase of the pathology; to improve the comfort of the patients, a smartphone medical app has been developed and tested, therefore evaluating the relevance of the data acquired by sensors embedded in an Android smartphone, and assessing the overall feasibility of such a decision support system.