advertisement
Facebook
X
LinkedIn
WhatsApp
Reddit

Michael J Fox Foundation turns to big data for Parkinson’s treatment

Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative affliction which can cause symptoms ranging from mood swings to tremors to severe cognitive impairment and is second only to Alzheimer’s in prevalence for a condition of this kind affecting around five million people worldwide. It was first described in 1817 and has been the subject of extensive research and medicines.

Yet despite massive improvements in the effectiveness of treatments in recent years, we still don’t really know a lot about it. In particular, there’s no objective way to diagnose it, especially in the early stages when it can still be treated well.

Which is why researchers at the Michael J Fox Foundation have just announced that they are teaming up with data scientists from Intel to gather a vast amount of information from Parkinson’s sufferers, by developing wearable monitoring devices which feed into a massive dedicated computing platform based on Cloudera.

“The variability in Parkinson’s symptoms creates unique challenges in monitoring progression of the disease,” said Diane Bryant of Intel’s Data Center Group, “Emerging technologies can not only create a new paradigm for measurement of Parkinson’s, but as more data is made available to the medical community, it may also point to currently unidentified features of the disease that could lead to new areas of research.”

Parkinson’s sufferers are generally encouraged to keep a log of their symptoms in order to judge the severity of the disease and efficacy of treatments. It’s a huge challenge to keep accurate notes 24 hours a day, and those who took part in early trials of the monitors say that they quickly become unobtrusive. The devices are capable of collecting 300 observations a second.

The Michael J Fox Foundation was created after the eponymous actor and star of the Back to the Future series of films was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1998, at the height of his fame in the popular TV show Spin City. To date the organisation has raised $450m ($4.5bn) for research into Parkinson’s, and it says that the data collected from the Intel monitoring system will be published openly for other organisations to share.

So far, the monitoring kits have been tested on a trial group of 25 participants, and the software is currently being refined for mass use. Intel says that it’s developing a smartphone app that will allow patients to add notes to their records around their medicinal intake for the day.

We’ll be catching up with some of the researchers involved in the project for an exclusive chat tomorrow.

What’s really remarkable, though, is that one of the sophisticated monitors used in the trial appears to be a simple Pebble watch – as shown in the video below.’

advertisement

About Author

advertisement

Related News

advertisement