PDLens: smartphone knows drug effectiveness among Parkinson's via daily-life activity fusion

Drug effectiveness management is a complicated and challenging task in chronic diseases, like Parkinson's Disease (PD). Drug effectiveness control is not only linked to personal out-of-pocket cost but also affecting the quality of life among patients with chronic symptoms. In the current practice, although that health and medical professionals still play a key role in the personalized treatment plan, the critical decision on drug selection falls upon the individual report when patients call in or visit the clinics. Unfortunately, most of the patients with chronic diseases either fail to report their day-to-day symptoms or have a limited access to medical resources due to economic constraints. In this paper, we present PDLens, a first smartphone-based system to detect drug effectiveness among Parkinson's in daily life. Specifically, PDLens can extract digital behavioral markers related to PD drug responses from everyday activities, including phone calls, standing, and walking. PDLens models the PD symptom severity on drug treatment and detects the change of severity scores before and after drug intake. A ranking-based multi-view deep neural network is developed to decide the drug effectiveness upon the symptom severity changes. To validate the performance of PDLens, we conduct a pilot study with 81 PD patients and monitor their smartphone activities and severity changes over 33693 drug intake events across six (6) months. Compared with the standard clinical drug effectiveness test developed by Motor Disorder Society, results reveal that PDLens is a promising tool to facilitate drug effectiveness detection among PD patients in their daily lives.