Statistical characterization of the finger tapping test using an android mobile app

© 2017 IEEE. In this research, a system to objectively quantify the Finger Tapping Test (FTT) is presented. The main element of this system is the Finger-TApp application, developed in order to record the taps performed by the people evaluated for 10 seconds. The study was performed with 64 healthy participants, aged between 50 and 83 years, men and women. Initially they were analyzed in three age groups, but finding no greater differences between these groups, it was decided to analyze all of them in a single set. With the results of the amount of taps performed by each patient, the mean and standard deviation were calculated; based on these values, the Upper Standard Deviation (USD) and the Lower Standard Deviation (LSD) were calculated. Additionally, it was verified that the distribution of the amount of taps, in the range of ages of the evaluated participants, corresponds to a normal distribution. According to the results obtained, future work is proposed, including improvements in the system and evaluations of people with Parkinson's disease, in which case the results obtained in the current study will be taken as a normality reference.