Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease, and manifestation of the symptoms is highly dynamic as it changes daily or even hourly. Yet, the current healthcare model of PD typically involves clinical evaluations performed every 4 to 6 months using subjective measures (i.e. visual observation) because of the physicians’ time and economic constraints. The infrequent and subjective assessments of PD progression impose problems in health management and intervention, leading to poorer control of the disease and negative patient’s experience. The importance of a solution for objective and continuous monitoring of PD has been advocated in scientific literature, media and, anecdotally by healthcare professionals, but there is no practical solution available to PD patients.
The goal of the ERC Proof of Concept conPD-mode (899260) was therefore to develop a solution that can bridge this gap, while focusing on satisfying three unmet needs in successfully bringing the PD assessment tool to the market: improving precision and accuracy of the PD analyses, enhancing usability of the systems, and reducing their cost.
This led to the development of a new software package for the continuous monitoring of Parkinson’s symptoms in a non-invasively manner using inertial measurements from a low-cost wearable sensor (e.g. a smart watch) to supplement clinical decisions about healthcare management.
The development of this software followed a participatory design philosophy, where semi-structured interviews were conducted with stakeholders during various stages of the development for requirement elicitation and iterative improvement of software design.
In brief, the Proof-of-Concept software system contains three major components:
• A web-based interface for continuous monitoring of the PD symptomatic severity by a healthcare provider
• A wearable and mobile software applications for collecting IMU data from commercial wearables.
• A secured database that stores the patient data that is collected from the wearables.
In addition to the development of the software package, the project produced insights into how such a technology could be positioned in today’s market, to ensure wide adoption. This laid the foundation of several collaborations and of an EIC Transition proposal that will be submitted in 2022. The activities of the ERC Proof of Concept (validation, market, IP, business strategy) will serve to raise additional funding, through national/European funding frameworks (non-dilutive) or, pending additional validation, venture capital (dilutive).
