Parkinson’s Disease is a movement disorder in which the patient may experience tremor, slow movements, stiff joints, and impaired gait. Some patients have found relief through the use of deep brain stimulation (DBS) treatments. Companies have been working towards solutions that provide patients with the much needed relief.
Great Lakes NeuroTechnologies (GLN) are the makers of Kinesia, which is a system of wearable sensors and mobile apps for Parkinson’s disease assessment. The company has received funding from National Institute of Health (NIH) to improve efficiency of DBS programming and minimize the time required by clinician to optimize the settings. The current challenge is that clinicians have to manually adjust various settings to provide effective DBS treatments for individual patients. The new GLN technology uses algorithms that will search settings and select optimal parameters that will be validated using real-time close-loop feedback from sensors to adjust DBS to a patient’s requirements.
Parkinson’s is a progressive disease, which means that in most cases it will gradually get worse. The rate of deterioration varies from one patient to next. There is no known cure for the disease. The only treatment at this point is to provide relief from the symptoms that a patient feels. Innovations such as this will come as much relief to growing number of patients with Parkinson’s disease.
[image – http://glneurotech.com/kinesia/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/KDBS6.jpg]
