Abstract
Similarities in physiological and psychological symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and Essential Tremor make accurate diagnosis of these conditions difficult. We have developed a smartphone-based application that uses discrete wavelet transforms and support vector machines to discriminate between Parkinson’s and Essential postural tremors with over 96% of accuracy. We have demonstrated that attention and distraction can be used to efficiently discriminate between these two disorders and we propose a novel method that uses the influence of attention and distraction while recording the tremor. Our findings confirm that there are significant differences in postural tremors with different attention and distraction tasks. With respect to those differences we have effectively demonstrated that attention and distraction can be used to efficiently discriminate between the two disorders.