Company Launches New Product

Great Lakes NeuroTechnologies has just launched the Kinesia ProView™ capable of visualizing motor symptom severity response during programming of Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) for Parkinson’s disease. DBS represents a growing therapy for movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease as current estimates indicate a $500 million global market with projections to over $1 billion by 2020.

The system provides a standardized platform to quantitatively assess how Parkinson’s symptoms such as tremor, bradykinesia and dyskinesias change in response to DBS settings during outpatient programming.

Developed in collaboration with clinical studies at the Cleveland Clinic and the University of Minnesota, the system is FDA cleared to market in the U.S, is CE Marked, and has Health Canada and Australian TGA approval for distribution in international markets.

DBS involves implanting an electrode in a specific area of the brain and then adjusting stimulation settings to a level that alleviates symptoms without causing side effects. While the therapy has been shown to be effective for treating Parkinson’s motor symptoms, there can be disparity in outcomes among implanted patients due to varied postoperative management, particularly concerning DBS programming optimization.

Kinesia ProView quantitatively assesses motor symptoms in response to stimulation settings and provides tools to quickly visualize the programming space. During a programming assessment, the patient wears a wireless sensor to assess motor symptoms such as tremor, bradykinesia, and dyskinesia at each DBS setting.

A table PC application creates color-coded tuning maps as the programming session progresses, which display specific symptom severities as a function of stimulation setting. These tuning maps allow physicians to visually assess the programming parameter space and optimize the final settings for specific symptoms and battery consumption.

Once the programming session is complete, patient data and tuning maps are transmitted via broadband connectivity to a cloud-based server for storage, reporting, and trending using the Kinesia web application.

According to Joseph P. Giuffrida, PhD, President and Principal Investigator at Great Lakes NeuroTechnologies, “Patients may encounter a wide variety of constantly changing symptoms while clinicians have the challenge of matching patient characteristics to an increasingly complex array of treatment options and settings. The Kinesia product was developed to improve the management of Parkinson’s through quantitative assessment and telemedicine with target clinical applications.”

For more information, go to www.glneurotech.com.