Smartwatch detected Parkinson’s symptom changes
At the study’s conclusion, researchers found that participant data collected through a smartwatch detected symptoms of Parkinson’s, including significant declines in measures of gait, an increase in tremors, modest changes in speech, and decreases in arm swing.
“Our findings showed that the smartwatch and smartphone application were able to objectively detect changes in gait and tremor over one year in people with early Parkinson’s disease,” Adams explained.
“The early Parkinson’s population is of interest for potential disease-modifying therapies. However, the disease progresses slowly, and our traditional measures are episodic and subjective and may not reflect an individual’s true state. Digital measures, in addition to advances in machine learning and AI, are poised to help us detect subtle changes in progression and help determine whether therapies, which are desperately needed in Parkinson’s disease, are working,” she continued.
“Parkinson’s disease is the fastest-growing neurologic disease. We currently do not have any medications to cure or slow the progression of the disease. Identifying objective, sensitive, and meaningful measures of disease progression will hopefully allow us to find treatments faster.”
— Jamie Adams, MD, lead study author
Next steps for smartwatches and Parkinson’s
Adams said digital measures must be sensitive to change and meaningful to people with the disease in order to be used as monitoring endpoints in clinical trials.
“A remote extension of this study using the smartwatch and smartphone application with remote visits has been generously funded by the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research and is underway,” she detailed.
“We will be analyzing the data for changes in the digital measures over three years and try to identify digital signals that are sensitive to or even predict medication initiation, and also conducting qualitative work to evaluate which measures are most meaningful to people with Parkinson’s and how that may change over time.”
“There is a lot of excitement for digital measures in Parkinson’s disease, but still much work to be done including continued algorithm development, refinement, and validation,” Adams added.
“This requires multi-stakeholder involvement, collaboration, and commitment including industry, academia, regulators, and most importantly, patients — this type of multi-stakeholder input has been present in WATCH-PD and is a key reason for the study’s success.”
New diagnostic tools for Parkinson’s needed
After reviewing this study, Hooman Azmi, MD, director of the Division of Functional and Restorative Neurosurgery at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, told MNT the study harnesses wearable technology to assess the symptoms of Parkinson’s.
“While (the) use of wearablesTrusted Source to assess Parkinson’s symptoms has been done before, this study is a larger scale study, looking at the ability of wearables to assess the progression of Parkinson’s compared to healthy controls,” Azmi said.
“It is important as it demonstrates the ability to continuously assess patients, and allows more information for the neurologist to better understand how their treatments are affecting the patient, not just during a visit in the office, but in between visits and on a continuous basis. This will help neurologists be able to better manage symptoms of Parkinson’s,” he added.
“It is important to understand how Parkinson’s progresses to be able to better diagnose and treat the disorder. Currently, our only and best way of diagnosis is a physical examination, looking at certain characteristics of a movement as well as symptomatic complaints of patients to diagnose them and to assess the response to medication. It is believed that by the time symptoms can be picked (and) identified in patients, degenerative changes have been going on in the brain for quite some time, possibly even over a decade, and being able to identify disease markers earlier will be important when we have agents that can slow down the disease or reverse it. We don’t have any such agents at the present time, but there is hope that we will have these in the not-so-distant future.”
— Hooman Azmi, MD, neurosurgeon
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