Great Lakes NeuroTechnologies (GLNT), www.glneurotech.com a small Cleveland Ohio-based company providing assessment tools for individuals with Parkinson’s has just launched their latest innovation “KINESIA 360™. The medical device can continuously perform a mobile assessment of Parkinson’s disease.
Kinesia 360 uses wireless patient-worn sensors and a smart phone mobile app to monitor severity of Parkinson’s symptoms throughout the day. Data and reports are remotely transmitted to a secure web portal for access by clinicians and researchers.
Parkinson’s disease impacts the quality of life for millions of people around the world. Some of the most common motor symptoms include tremor, slowed movements, stiffness, episodes of freezing, and gait abnormalities.
Therapies used to control those motor symptoms can often cause the side effect of wild irregular movements called dyskinesias which can have a major impact on quality of life and activities of daily living. Therefore, it is challenging to develop technology such as Kinesia 360 to accurately and remotely measure Parkinson’s symptoms.
Motion sensors are common today in wearables, watches, and mobile devices for monitoring exercise or general step counts. This method to simply measure movements does not provide a direct measure of Parkinson’s disease features such as tremor, bradykinesia, or dyskinesia as each of these symptoms have very distinct features.
According to Joseph P. Giuffrida, PhD, President and Principal Investigator, “Having a sensor in the pocket is great if you simply want to measure movement. However, if the target is to specifically measure Parkinson’s symptoms and side effects, then more accurate and intelligent technology is required.”
GLNT researchers report that it’s not about just rapidly collecting as much data as you can. The small subtle details used to develop Kinesia 360 are in the protocol design, positioning, in the sensitivity of sensors, and in the use of intelligent algorithms to process the data.
An important piece of the Parkinson’s assessment puzzle relates to the tradeoff of sensitivity of data versus user compliance. Higher sensitivity of data often leads to more accurate results for assessing Parkinson’s symptoms, but may come at the cost of patient compliance.
For example, “Imagine a system that uses 100 motion sensors all over the body to help Parkinson’s patients, it would likely have greater ability to accurately detect symptoms than using a single sensor on a smart phone in someone’s pocket”, reports Dr Giuffrida. “However, the likelihood of a patient complying with putting on 100 sensors every day is incredibly low.”
As he explains, “It is important to have a strategically located suite of sensors in convenient, wearable, cosmetically acceptable devices that minimally impact a patient’s time or daily routine but yet at the same time, provides sensitive data with just two sensors to detect Parkinson’s symptoms. That is why GNLT produced Kinesia 360.”