Three-Dimensional Pattern Features in Finger Tapping Test for Patients with Parkinson’s disease

Finger tapping test is an important neuropsychological test to evaluate human motor function. Most recent researches simplified the finger tapping motion as a scissors-like motion, though the rotation axis of the thumb was different from that of the forefinger. In this paper, we proposed a three-dimensional (3-D) finger tapping measurement system to obtain 3-D pattern features in finger tapping test for patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD). The proposed system collected the motion of the thumb and the forefinger by nine-degrees-freedom sensors and calculated 3-D motion of finger tapping by an orientation estimation method and a 3-D finger-tapping kinematic model. We further extracted 3-D pattern features, i.e. motor coordination and relative thumb motion, from 3-D Finger Tapping motion. Moreover, we used the proposed system to collect the finger-tapping motion of 43 PD patients and 30 healthy controls in horizontal tasks and vertical tasks. The results indicated that 3-D pattern features showed a better performance than one-dimensional features in the identification of mild PD patients.Clinical Relevance— These three-dimensional pattern features could be used to evaluate finger tapping motion in a novel way, which could be used to better identify mild Parkinson’s disease patients. Furthermore, the results showed that a combination of horizontal tasks and vertical tasks might be a better way to identify mild Parkinson’s disease patients.