Determining Necessary Length of the Alternating Series Test for Parkinson's Disease Modelling

Abstract

Fine motor tests have been a workhorse in neurology, psychology and psychiatry nearly for one hundred years. In spite of its simplicity, just paper and pen required to conduct the test, their results were proven to be reliable and accepted by the medical community. Nevertheless, it should be noted that assessment of the testing results was and is performed visually by the practitioner, whereas no measurable numeric parameters are used. Such setting inevitably introduces a subjective component to the assessment. Introduction of digital tables and later tablet computers has opened new frontiers in the fine motor analysis. Nowadays tablet computer equipped with stylus pen allows collecting kinematic and pressure parameters describing aspects of the test invisible to the naked eye. In spite of the recent achievements in the digitisation of fine motor tests, very few attention was paid to the parameters of the tests itself. In this paper, the length of the alternating series test is investigated with respect to the accuracy of the classifiers, used to support diagnostics of the Parkinson's disease.