This website will close on 30 April 2024. After this date, your content will not be accessible. Please contact info@healthinnovationnwc.nhs.uk for more information.

Proven innovation
Share innovation

Objective Diagnosis of Parkinson's

By Harvey Dettmar, ClearSky Medical Diagnostics Limited Added 16th Aug, 2018 Updated 23rd Jul, 2019

Diagnosis of Parkinson’s can be difficult to confirm by conventional clinical assessment alone. It is estimated that clinical mis-diagnosis rates of Parkinson’s may be as high as 25 per cent, even among experienced neurologists.

PD-Monitor - Objective Diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease This novel non-invasive device confirms diagnosis of Parkinson's disease by digitally measuring patients performing a simple finger tapping test used in conventional clinical evaluation. This allows microscopic movements, invisible to the human eye, to be identified that characterise the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease in a way that has not previously been possible.

About

PD-Monitor - Tier 2 Product.

PD-Monitor assists specialists by measuring symptoms of Parkinson’s while patients undertake routine clinical tasks. The system gives an objective measure of an existing test routinely performed by consultants.

Small, non-invasive sensors positioned on the finger and thumb measure patients‘ movements in response to the finger-tapping test, a clinical task in which the patient repeatedly taps the forefinger and thumb of each hand for a period of 10-30 seconds.

Readings from the sensors are transmitted to a computer and analysed by specialist software employing biologically inspired algorithms. These algorithms have been trained to recognise patient movements characteristic of tremor and bradykinesia, two important symptoms of Parkinson’s. The results are then presented on the tablet computer in an easy to interpret display that can be used to help diagnose and monitor the progression of Parkinson’s disease.

Previous Studies:

Research studies on the effectiveness of PD-Monitor show how the system can accurately classify the presence of Bradykinesia in the dominant hand finger tapping data collected from participants with grade one MDS-UPDRS bradykinesia scores Parkinson's disease (n=45) versus healthy controls (n=41) with an area under curve (ROC) of .952, p<.0001 (95% CI 0.907- 0.997. The algorithm also correctly classified 14 out of 15 of the PD finger tapping data sets with grade one MDS-UPDRS bradykinesia scores in a USA validation set.

Current usage

PD-Monitor is being used in a nationwide study (PD-STAT https://penctu.psmd.plymouth.ac.uk/pdstat/ ) to investigate whether statins are effective in slowing the progress of Parkinson’s.

 

Related Innovations