Digital diagnostics and intervention services for Parkinson’s disease

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  Development of digital diagnostics and intervention services for Parkinson’s disease

• IRAS ID

  340549

• Contact name

  Helen Dawes

• Contact email

  H.dawes@exeter.ac.uk

• Sponsor organisation

  The University of Exeter

• Duration of Study in the UK

  2 years, 0 months, 1 days

• Research summary

  People with Parkinson's have infrequent clinical consultation (once every 12-18 months) and limited rehabilitation. Assessment play an important role in these consultations to help clinicians understand patients' health status and disease progression necessary to adjust treatment plans. The current way of measuring is the UPDRS which needs a clinician to do this and takes 30 minutes. There is a strong need for more frequent and accurate Parkinson's assessments in the clinic and at home to detect changes early and then give appropriate support and drug and physiotherapy quickly. There is a need to develop good home digital physiotherapy tools to increase the amount of therapy.
  Here we are testing new digital technologies to do these assessments in the home and clinic and a new digital physiotherapy device in the home.

  We aim to conduct a clinical study with 50 people with Parkinson's (50 from UK) with the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale [UPDRS], (a rating scale that is commonly used in clinical settings to evaluate the progression of Parkinson's disease) and 30 healthy adults. We will develop and investigate if two new digital devices, one the MachineMD that measures eye movement and one the gaitQ that measures gait can be used instead of the motor Movement Disorder Society [MDS]-UPDRS (motor) using digital gait and ophthalmic features in the clinic setting.
  We will investigate the effect of a physiotherapy gait intervention gaitQ Tempo in the home context for two weeks and of doing the gait measure at home. We will determine the potential of the gaitQ intervention to improve key gait metrics in order to collect clinical evidence and of using the gaitQ as a cuing system over a 2-week period on gait and other movement measures in the home and community

• REC name

  North of Scotland Research Ethics Committee 1

• REC reference

  24/NS/0047

• Date of REC Opinion

  24 Apr 2024

• REC opinion

  Favourable Opinion