Measuring parkinsonian symptoms with a tracking device.

After a brief discussion of the existing methods of measuring various motor and other neurological functions as well as methods of inferring the parkinsonian symptoms therefrom, a simple computer based device and a method making use of pursuit tracking to assess different motor and neurologic characteristics are proposed. Computational methods of extracting attributes from the tracking data like the reaction time, the movement time and the error area between the reference signal and the tracking response are discussed. Measurements with a control population of healthy subjects are synopsized. Measurements with parkinsonian patients presenting tremor or bradykinesia as major symptoms are described. Finally, both results are compared.