Huntington’s disease, an inherited progressive brain disorder that causes neurons to die in the brain, affects 1 in 10,000 to 20,000 people of European (Caucasian) descent. The disorder, which reduces life expectancy and has symptoms including irritability, depression, involuntary movements, bad coordination and trouble learning new information, is as of now incurable.

Kaunas University of Technology researchers have now developed a technology that can advance the early detection of this rare disorder: a smartphone app that can recognize symptoms.

Individuals with this condition may live 15 to 20 years following the first signs of symptoms, but detecting the disorder even earlier could improve life expectancy.

The rare disease, which results in movement, mental and emotional changes, also raises the risk in patients for heart disease, pneumonia, injuries from falls and even suicide.

Aimed at recognizing the disorder even before there are any visual symptoms, the application allows the user to check for symptoms with a series of tests from their smartphone.

Although the application does not diagnose Huntington’s disease, if a probability of symptoms is detected, it will inform the individual to see a doctor.

The application, called “The Neural Impairment Test Suite,” detailed in a study published in the Hindawi, the Journal of Healthcare and Engineering, examines motor and cognitive skills, and stores the user’s information in their profile.

“The app analyzes the result of a test session and compares the result with all previous test attempts, and also with those of healthy test subjects,” Rytis Maskeliunas said in a statement to Laboratory Equipment. “This allows us to observe how close a person's performance is to the norm or how they are deviating for better or for worse (in such a case it is a person's responsibility to seek a professional medical advice, as the app does not seek to replace a medic). Think of the app as a stimulus to go and register for a visit to a neuro clinic."

Maskeliunas currently works at Kaunas University of Technology in the Department of Multimedia Engineering and Faculty of Informatics.

To test the app, the researchers had 10 patients with Huntington’s disease living in Lithuania—who fall into the early clinical descriptor category of the disease—as well as 10 healthy patients use the app.

The model’s ability was then validated by a dataset of 3,032 records from both patients with and without the disease.

“In the early stages, we consulted medical professionals to visualize different methods of patient evaluation to digitize (in parallel, the latest related research papers from other scientists were investigated and the most promising results were taken into account),” Maskeliunas said. “Target test groups were designed based on tremor, cognitive, speech and energy expenditure symptoms (all digitizable stuff related to Huntington disease symptoms, as well as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc.)”

Components of the app that helped to pinpoint pinpoint symptoms included tremor impairment components; cognitive impairment components; a speech impairment component; and an energy expenditure component.

Currently, research in the area mainly focuses on identifying problems in the early stages of the condition, but the mobile application could advance further research.