Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a neurological disease of the central nervous system that is the leading cause of non-traumatic disability in young adults. Clinical laboratory tests and neuroimaging studies are the standard methods to diagnose and monitor MS. However, due to infrequent clinic visits, it is fundamental to identify remote and frequent approaches for monitoring MS, which enable timely diagnosis, early access to treatment, and slowing down disease progression. In this work, we investigate the most reliable, clinically useful, and available features derived from mobile and wearable devices as well as their ability to distinguish people with MS (PwMS) from healthy controls, recognize MS disability and fatigue levels. To this end, we formalize clinical knowledge and derive behavioral markers to characterize MS. We evaluate our approach on a dataset we collected from 55 PwMS and 24 healthy controls for a total of 489 days conducted in free-living conditions. The dataset contains wearable sensor data – e.g., heart rate – collected using an arm-worn device, smartphone data – e.g., phone locks – collected through a mobile application, patient health records – e.g., MS type – obtained from the hospital, and self-reports – e.g., fatigue level – collected using validated questionnaires administered via the mobile application. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of using features derived from mobile and wearable sensors to monitor MS. Our findings open up opportunities for continuous monitoring of MS in free-living conditions and can be used to evaluate and guide the effectiveness of treatments, manage the disease, and identify participants for clinical trials.

多发性硬化症 (MS) 是一种中枢神经系统神经系统疾病，是导致年轻人非创伤性残疾的主要原因。临床实验室测试和神经影像学研究是诊断和监测多发性硬化症的标准方法。然而，由于诊所就诊频率较低，因此确定远程和频繁监测多发性硬化症的方法至关重要，这样可以及时诊断、及早获得治疗并减缓疾病进展。在这项工作中，我们研究了源自移动和可穿戴设备的最可靠、临床上有用和可用的功能，以及它们区分 MS 患者 (PwMS) 与健康对照、识别 MS 残疾和疲劳程度的能力。为此，我们将临床知识形式化并推导行为标记来表征多发性硬化症。我们使用从 55 个 PwMS 和 24 个健康对照中收集的数据集来评估我们的方法，该数据集在自由生活条件下进行总共 489 天。该数据集包含可穿戴传感器数据（例如，心率）（使用手臂佩戴设备收集）、智能手机数据（例如手机锁）（通过移动应用程序收集）、患者健康记录（例如 MS 类型）（从医院获得）以及自我记录- 使用通过移动应用程序管理的经过验证的调查问卷收集的报告（例如疲劳程度）。我们的结果证明了使用移动和可穿戴传感器的功能来监测多发性硬化症的可行性。我们的研究结果为在自由生活条件下持续监测多发性硬化症提供了机会，可用于评估和指导治疗的有效性、管理疾病以及确定临床试验的参与者。