Objective: We introduce Sleep Fit, the first tablet application to collect subjective and objective clinical data especially designed for patients with Parkinson’s Disease (PD).

Background: Home-based systems to collect data from patients with PD have been getting increasingly common in last years. New technologies provide helpful tools to improve patients’ care and quality of life. Nevertheless, these devices might not be easy to use by these patients.

Methods: Sleep Fit is a tablet app conceived especially for patients with PD with the aim to collect objective and subjective data at their home. Its core structure consists in a) an electronic finger tapping test; b) motor, sleepiness and emotional subjective scales; c) a sleep diary. From the prototype “alpha” to the current version v1.1.4, key improvements were made in order to enhance the patients’ compliance and the quality of collected data. Sleep Fit v1.1.4 provides enhanced ergonomics and graphical features, automated flows that guide the patients in performing tasks throughout the 24 hours; secured real-time data collection and consultation; possibility to easily integrate new tasks and features. The patients were asked to perform multiple assessments four times a day, during two weeks at their home, by mean of Sleep Fit. We evaluated the patients’ compliance, defined as the percentage of completed tasks on the total expected tasks. We also evaluated the satisfaction of the 17 patients having used the final version of Sleep Fit.

Results: Sleep Fit was tested by 43 consecutive PD patients (10 females, mean age 67.7 ± 9.8). Of them, 19 used the alpha version, 7 an intermediate version and 17 the final v1.1.4 version. Overall, the compliance was 90%. It increased from 88% for the patients using the alpha version to 94% with the final one. At the end of the two weeks, 94% of the patients declared they would use again Sleep Fit for clinical purposes for the same time (76.5%) or even for longer (17.7%).

Conclusions: Sleep Fit is a well-accepted, easy-to-use tool to accurately collect objective and subjective data in PD and to increase compliance in home-based studies in these patients. It outstands other home-based systems for ergonomics and usability for patients with PD. Patients’ compliance was higher in our study compared to previous similar studies. [figure1]

References: Arora S, Venkataraman V, Zhan A, et al. Detecting and monitoring the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease using smartphones: A pilot study. Parkinsonism Relat Disord 2015;21(6):650-3. doi: 10.1016/j.parkreldis.2015.02.026. van Gilst MM, Bloem BR, Overeem S. Prospective assessment of subjective sleep benefit in Parkinson disease. BMC neurology 2015;15(1):2. doi: 10.1186/s12883-014-0256-2.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/improving-clinical-data-collection-at-patients-home-in-parkinsons-disease-the-sleep-fit-app/