NR Times meets Nikos Moschos, co-founder of PD Neurotechnology, to discuss the future of Parkinson’s tech treatments.
Currently, there is no cure for Parkinson’s disease, with existing treatments covering surgery, medication and supportive therapies such as physiotherapy.
Technology, on the other hand, can offer numerous benefits to people who live with Parkinson’s.
“The biggest challenge for people living with Parkinson’s is realising that it will get worse,” says Nikos Moschos. “It is a race against time.”
Dr Moschos explains that people with Parkinson’s are usually visited at home by a physician who can detect changes in the disease and who can advise the patient to change medication.
“Patients are not followed very frequently, maybe once or twice per year. The problem is what happens in between”.
This is when technology comes in to help patients as “they can be continuously informed about their status”.
PD Neurotechnology’s latest technology, PDMonitor, has recently moved to the next stage in the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) evaluation.
PDMonitor is a wearable medical device for continuous monitoring of Parkinson’s disease symptoms, designed for home use by patients and their caregivers.
Dr Moschos says: “This is a major breakthrough as it possibly changes the paradigm of how you follow the disease.
“With habitual monitoring we can understand if there is a change in the status of the patient, and accordingly, optimise their treatments.”
Wearing a medical device allows Parkinson’s patients to have an objective view of the disease progression and it also helps them share data with physicians and other caregivers easily.
This type of wearable device aims to improve patient-physician interaction and clinical decision making with the main aim of improving the patients experience.
“This type of technology is revolutionising the way chronic disease management is done,” says Dr Moschos.
“We all need to help the healthcare system in order to have a true digital transformation through artificial intelligence and wearable sensors.
“One of our goals is to be able to use these technologies in other movement disorders, such as multiple sclerosis, or even in stroke rehabilitation.
“Our goal is to help patients live better with our technologies.”
Nearly one million people in US are currently living with Parkinson’s disease, which is more than the combined number of people diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy and Lou Gehrig’s disease. This is expected to rise to 1.2 million by 2030, according to Parkinson.org.
