Parkinetics

Parkinetics’ mission is to improve movement disorder care by turning everyday activities into objective, clinically meaningful measurements of function. Using low-cost sensors projected to cost $50 to $70 per unit, embedded in familiar objects such as toothbrushes and haircombs, Parkinetics helps clinicians, researchers, and pharmaceutical partners better diagnose, monitor, and study Parkinson’s disease and related disorders. With early results showing over 90% accuracy in distinguishing patients from controls and a first market of nearly 40 million people globally living with movement disorders, our goal is to improve patient independence, care decisions, and the development of therapies.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is an incurable, progressive neurodegenerative disorder that affects approximately one million individuals in the United States and 11.8 million globally. Patients with PD suffer from both motor (including slowed movements, tremor, rigidity, and postural instability) and non-motor symptoms (including sleep disturbances, GI distress, and cognitive decline). These clinical manifestations of the disease can result in a significant decline in patient functional independence, the ability to perform daily activities without assistance, and quality of life (QOL). As a result, PD was estimated to have caused the loss of 3.2 million disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs: the sum of years with disability and years of life lost) and 211,296 deaths in 2016 alone. A critical manifestation of declining functional independence in patients with PD (PwPD) is an inability to perform critical activities of daily living (ADLs), including those related to personal hygiene, daily sustenance, and bodily movement. To address this, physicians increasingly prescribe PwPD with occupational therapy, whereby therapists provide personalized strategies to maintain mobility and ADL performance despite motor impairments. Despite this recognition that ADL performance is a critical therapeutic target and conduit for overall QOL, standard clinical treatment, patient monitoring, and drug development collectively focus almost entirely on alleviating patient symptoms, which does not necessarily translate into meaningful improvements in day-to-day function or independence. As a result, there is a critical need for objective, granular, and physiologically relevant measures of motor function, ADL performance, and QOL. This manifests in the following conditions: (1) In the Clinic: Neurologists lack time-efficient, quantitative tools for precise symptom assessment during brief visits, leading to reliance on subjective impressions and potentially missing subtle, yet clinically important, changes. (2) In the home, there is a critical absence of reliable methods to capture longitudinal performance of ADLs in a patient’s typical environment. These gaps between assessments blind clinicians to fluctuations in patient functionality, medication response patterns, and disease progression in real-world settings. (3) In Diagnosis: Patients with atypical Parkinsonisms suffer from a high rate (up to 25%) of misdiagnosis. Neurologists urgently need quantitative biomarkers to augment traditional clinical exams and improve diagnostic accuracy early in the disease course. (4) In Clinical Trials: Pharmaceutical companies require direct, objective, and sensitive measures of patient functional independence and QOL to robustly demonstrate drug efficacy. The reliance on patient-reported diaries or coarse clinical assessments is a major limitation, increasing trial risk, cost, and the likelihood of failed or inconclusive outcomes. To assess patients' performance of ADLs, Parkinetics has developed a novel, sensor-based approach in which we attach affordable, commercially available inertial measurement units (IMUs) to instruments used by patients – namely, toothbrushes and hair combs. This enables the collection of rich, three-dimensional (3D) acceleration and angular velocity data from patients during ADLs such as brushing and hair combing. For our initial proof-of-concept studies, IMUs have been attached to instruments using 3D-printed holders and secured with rubber bands; however, we have prototyped comprehensive sensor holders for the anticipated commercialization of our product.