A Pilot Study to Evaluate the Augmented Reality-Based Dance Application on Mobility and Balance of Persons With Parkinson's Disease

The common symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD) include but are not limited to resting tremor, muscular rigidity, and difficulty in initiating movement. These motor impairments, which can negatively impact the fluidity and pacing of movement, can increase the risk people with PD face in their daily activities. Additionally, non-motor symptoms such as apathy and depression can often lead to isolation, potentially reducing physical activity in people with PD.

In 2001, Dance for Parkinson's Disease (DfPD), a collaboration between Brooklyn Parkinson Group (BPG) and Mark Morris Dance Group (MMDG), an internationally known company based in Brooklyn, began providing dance classes for the Parkinson community to train other teachers in the hopes of developing cognitive strategies and to enhance the sense of community and the amount of physical activity in PD population. Since then, positive effects of dance in motor and cognitive functions of people with PD have been reported from several types of dance classes.

While recent research has investigated dance as a therapy for people with Parkinson's disease (PD), there is only one study, to our knowledge, that investigates the use of Google Glass as a portable way for persons with PD to use cued movement as they perform activities of daily living to help temporarily alleviate symptoms such as freezing, initiating movement, and balancing. This qualitative study explored the acceptability of the Google Glass in five participants with PD, as well as their caregivers. The results of this study showed that participants highly favored the voice activation system used to control this technology, especially in comparison to the frustrations expressed using touch screen smart phones. The participants also expressed increased confidence because the Google Glass gave them a sense of independence when going out into public alone. Despite the potential beneficial uses of the Glass, due to the highly complicated menus with multiple applications participants found using the Glass frustrating. Additionally, low number of participants used in this study, very short intervention time, and the lack of quantitative data suggests that further investigation of use of a simplified version of Google Glass in rehabilitation of Parkinson's disease is necessary.

Recently, MMDG created Moving Through Glass (MTG), a project that was funded by Google, as a portable, round-the-clock extension of the internationally acclaimed Dance for PD®. When a user activates Glass, they can choose from a variety of different exercises, like "warm me up" or "balance me." Once selected, they see the founder instructors of the Dance for PD® projected in front of them.

As a single site research study at Syracuse University, researchers will be conducting the pilot phase of the research project. MMDG provided the research team with the three pairs of glasses needed to complete this study. At the end of this study, the glasses will be returned to MMDG. The MTG questionnaire (described in detail in Section 4), provided by MMDG as part of their product development, will also be given to the participants to collect information about the product. MTG questionnaires, including only deidentified, gross data, will be shared with MMDG as a part of product development, not research. Researchers will NOT be reporting our research findings to Google or MMDG.