In this paper, the waveforms measured by the strain gauge in the tapping test on a number of healthy subjects and patients with Parkinson's disease are analyzed with the objective of reaching a quantitatively evaluation of the associated symptom. It has been observed that the waveform of a patient with Parkinson's disease becomes more irregular as the symptom is getting more serious, while the waveform of a healthy subject is rather regular. In this study, the regularity of the waveform is evaluated by the so-called trajectory parallel measure. The results show a large difference in the trajectory parallel measure of the waveforms of healthy subjects vs. those of the Parkinson's disease patients. Furthermore, the trajectory parallel measure of Parkinson's disease patients can be quantitatively ranked to correlate to the degree of the symptom. This paper begins with a brief description about Parkinson's disease. The trajectory parallel measure is then introduced and applied to analysis of the waveforms of both healthy subjects and patients with Parkinson's disease. Illustrative results are shown to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed analysis methodology.

Nowadays, in various wireless sensor networks, both aperiodically generated packets like event detections and periodically generated ones for environmental, machinery, vital monitoring, etc. are transferred. Thus, packet loss caused by collision should be suppressed among aperiodic and periodic packets. In addition, some packets for wireless applications such as factory IoT must be transferred within permissible end-to-end delays, in addition to improving packet loss. In this paper, we propose transmission timing control of both aperiodic and periodic packets at an upper layer of medium access control (MAC). First, to suppress packet loss caused by collision, transmission timings of aperiodic and periodic packets are distributed on the time axis. Then, transmission timings of delay-bounded packets with permissible delays are assigned within the bounded periods so that transfer within their permissible delays is possible to maximally satisfy their permissible delays. Such control at an upper layer has advantages of no modification to the MAC layer standardized by IEEE 802.11, 802.15.4, etc. and low sensor node cost, whereas existing approaches at the MAC layer rely on MAC modifications and time synchronization among all sensor nodes. Performance evaluation verifies that the proposed transmission timing control improves packet loss rate regardless of the presence or absence of packet's periodicity and permissible delay, and restricts average transfer delay of delay-bounded packets within their permissible delays comparably to a greedy approach that transmits delay-bounded packets to the MAC layer immediately when they are generated at an upper layer.