What?
A smartwatch designed for patients of Parkinson’s disease is due for rollout in the UK under new plans from the NHS. The Kinetigraph® is an innovative wrist-worn device designed to monitor movement symptoms associated with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and assess response to medication and physiotherapy treatments.
Those with PD will have several movement symptoms and the aim of treatment is to control these symptoms to allow patients to undertake ‘activities of daily living’, or ADLs. Common symptoms include bradykinesia (slow movement), tremor and gait (walking) changes. The watch is similar to a step-counter and is designed to detect changes in movement and save these instances to the device to be read by a health professional.
Why?
People with PD need regular monitoring of their symptoms to assess their disease status and how well medication is working. Medication aims to reduce the frequency of symptoms and allow patients to live full and normal lives. Currently, assessment of PD symptoms relies heavily on a patient’s own recall, and their recollection is often affected by memory and inaccurate description. Patients’ ability to communicate is often affected by the disease too, which makes explaining symptoms to clinicians more difficult.
The Kinetigraph® aims to remove this human factor, providing an electronic record of these movement symptoms by detecting arm swing or tremor. This allows clinicians to detect how often these symptoms are occurring.
If symptoms are occurring more often, they will be recorded more often, and patients can have their medication doses increased. If symptoms are stable, medication doses will remain unchanged.
How (does it affect you)?
If you or a loved one suffers from Parkinson’s disease, this news may have a profound effect on the control of treatment. PD patients should regularly see their GP, neurologist (hospital consultant) or PD specialist nurse and have medication changes. But they will often be under or overdosed based on inaccurate symptom reports. This new device aims to remove much of the guesswork involved with medication prescribing, and provide an objective, unbiased account of a patient’s symptoms. It also aims to produce useful data (similar to our previous article on diabetes smart devices) that allow fine-tuning of medication doses throughout the day.
The device is worn as a wristwatch, is easy to use and lightweight, so it shouldn’t impact the patient’s daily life. There are some suggestions of mild irritation caused by the strap, but this has been observed in only 1-5% of patients.
At a health systems level, the watch is hoped to reduce the reliance on doctor’s appointments, with training being offered to other members of the healthcare team to read the device and provide treatment recommendations. However, these medication recommendations will need to be approved by prescribers.
Regulatory bodies hope that this will reduce the overall spend on Parkinson’s treatment by reducing the number of hospital visits for follow-up. This may lead to a fairer allocation of resources to more difficult to treat patients, whilst not affecting the care of more ‘well’ PD patients.
It is an exciting time for medical devices, and those such as the Kinetigraph® are already showing vast promise for a generation of patients.
As always, best wishes from myHSN
References:
https://neurologyacademy.org/articles/nice-updates-guidance-on-pkg-use-for-parkinsons-management
https://www.nice.org.uk/advice/mib258/chapter/Expert-comments
https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/gid-dg10047/documents/topic-description
