Objective Biometric Methods for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Nervous System Disorders

Book excerpt: Objective Biometric Methods for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Nervous System Disorders provides a new and unifying methodological framework, introducing new objective biometrics to characterize patterns of sensory motor control underlying symptoms. Its goal is to radically transform the ways in which disorders of the nervous system are currently diagnosed, tracked, researched and treated. This book introduces new ways to bring the laboratory to the clinical setting, to schools and to settings of occupational and physical therapy. Ready-to-use, graphic user interfaces are introduced to provide outcome measures from wearable sensors that automatically assess in near real time the effectiveness of interventions. Lastly, examples of how the new framework has been effectively utilized in the context of clinical trials are provided. - Provides methods and their implementation using real data and simple computer programs that students and researchers from less technically trained fields can use - Describes the motivation for methods according to the problem domain in light of existing methods for each chapter, along with their lack of neuroscientific foundation and invalid statistical assumptions - Accompanied by a companion website which contains Appendices with MATLAB codes and data samples to generate the graphics displayed in all chapter figures - Features videos illustrating the experimental set up for scenarios and methods described in each chapter - Includes step-by-step explanations of paradigms in each clinical or typical sample population to enable reproducibility of the study across different clinical phenotypes and levels of expertise in sports, the performing arts, or mere individual academic predispositions/preferences