More than 6 million people worldwide have been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, which is just one of many chronic movement disorders. The tremors and other uncontrolled movements can be treated using the medicine levodopa, which increases the amount of dopamine in the patient’s brain. One of the major challenges for healthcare professionals treating patients with such disorders is getting the correct dosage of the treatment, and assessing the severity of the tremors.
Global Kinetics has developed a solution to this problem. Their product, the Personal KinetiGraph (PKG), is a wrist-worn device that tracks a patient’s motion for six to 10 days at a time. The recorded data is then uploaded to a cloud service that analyzes it and provides a report for the patient and their healthcare professionals. This helps the clinician to understand what type of motion the patient is experiencing so that the medication dosage can be adjusted as needed.
The PKG would be helpful if this was all it did, but it does more. The device also can give the patient a reminder when it is time to take the medication. A flashing light and vibration alerts the patient, and continues until the patient taps the device to indicate that the medication has been taken. The device records the time, so that the clinician can also monitor when the patient took the treatment. This reminder and recording feature helps improve patient compliance with taking their medication.
The device has been approved by the FDA, so it should be available for sale within the United States soon.
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