Parkinson’s disease can produce tremor slowed movements, episodes of freezing, gait abnormalities, therapy side effects resulting in abnormal movements, and have a major impact on quality of life and activities of daily living.
Great Lakes Neuro Technologies (GLNT) Kinesia www.glneurotech.com/kinesia technology is able to assess and visualize these types of movement disorder symptoms for in-clinic and telemedicine applications.
“Computerized and automated systems to program Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) can provide significant benefit to the patient care market in Parkinson’s disease,” reports Christopher Pulliam PhD, Biomedical Researcher. “Kinesia technology can expand expert care to non-expert clinical centers and underserved populations and potentially reduce required clinician time for reviewing a complex number of possible stimulation settings during a programming session.”
GLNT has just recently announced that they have completed several pilot studies http://glneurotech.com/kinesia/validation/dbs-pilot-study to demonstrate computer-guided algorithms for programming DBS in Parkinson’s disease.
The first study in collaboration with the University of Minnesota used intelligent algorithms to navigate the programming space after a clinician-guided programming session and selected the DBS setting to optimize motor benefit and to maximize battery life. The results for the study were accepted for publication in “Parkinsonism and Related Disorders”.
The second study in collaboration with the University of Cincinnati, built on the success of the first study with computer-guided algorithms to recommend stimulation changes during programming and to calculate optimal final settings. The automated computer-guided algorithms improved motor outcomes by 38 percent which is similar to reported results of clinician-guided programming.