PDCheck3D

Parkinson’s Disease is impacting over 10 million people globally. I have seen the pains faced by my uncle and several other patients of Parkinson’s Disease. Patient’s body keeps degenerating and yet the patient and family don’t know how much has the disease progressed. While the treatment options, medication plan, physiotherapy plan, exercise regimen, the diet plan, the care, and the risks, change as the disease progresses, there is no scientific way to measure disease progression on a day-to-day basis. Even the observable symptoms - Stiffness, Gait change, Speech distortion, Tremor, etc are not accurately measured in a standard way. If there is no measurement, how would the patient know if disease is in control, deteriorating slow or deteriorating fast? Patients from towns and villages visit the doctors located in big cities for dosage adjustment whenever dosage needs to be adjusted. Due to reduced mobility of the patient, traveling becomes a challenge as the stiffness levels of patient go up. Also, even if the patient travels, medication dosages are prescribed by doctors (neurologists) based on the narrated experience of patients or their family members. There is clearly a need for remote monitoring as well. There is an urgent need to measure and profile all observable symptoms of patient on a frequent basis, analyse them and arrive at overall disease progression level at any given point in time.

My solution, PDCheck3D is a technique to accurately measure overall progression of Parkinson’s Disease at a given point in time and make the analysis available to the right stakeholders (doctors, physio-therapists, caregivers, etc).

Following are its components:
A wearable sensor and its controller-features for capturing the stiffness level of patient and make the analysis available to the right stakeholders (doctors, physio-therapists, caregivers)
A wearable sensor and its controller features for capturing the gait change over the period and make the analysis available to the right stakeholders (doctors, physio-therapists)
A sensor to capture speech sample of patient and calculate the speech distortion of the patient. Speech distortion seems more prominent among the patients who have undergone Deep Brain Stimulation Surgery.

Working model of this solution (PDCheck3D) is ready. Following are the working models:

Following is the overall arrangement:

The architecture

The goal is to measure progression of Parkinson’s Disease. It will be done by objectively capturing the levels of observable symptoms, namely – Stiffness (Slowness), Gait Change, Speech Distortion and Tremor of patient in real time. Tremor will be captured using JTremor3D device, which was presented
during ISEF’21. Using these levels of all the four major symptoms, the overall progression of disease (PD Progression Index) will be calculated.

The overall arrangement

The controller can be worn around the waist. All the body movements are to be captured by the sensors with respect to the controller, i.e., with reference to the body. This is unique as this technique ignores the movements that happen while the person is moving around voluntarily.

JStiffness3D: Stiffness is the main culprit leading to slowness of movements. Hence, by capturing level of stiffness (as JStiffness Index), slowness level also will be included. Stiffness level is of assistance to doctors and physiotherapists in planning their medications and therapies respectively. Stiffness is calculated by guiding patient to wear the upper arm band and perform some simple maneuvers like movement of hand and measuring the time taken in moving the hand vis-à-vis a healthy person and the level of
straightness achieved by patient in raising the hand.

JGaitChange3D

Gait of patient of Parkinson's Disease changes as the disease progresses. It is usually happening due to a combination of freezing of legs and upper body bending forward (body wants to move fast, but legs are not moving).

The Gait change is measured as Offset percentage of coordinates of ankle vis-à-vis the body as compared to previous coordinates during earlier stages of disease. Ankle positions will be measured at three positions at every step – Extreme front, on the ground and extreme back.

JSpeech3D:

Speech Distortion is noticeable during advanced stages of the disease progression. This is even more prominent in the patients who have undergone the Deep Brain Stimulation Surgery. Speech distortion usually manifests as incorrect pronunciations and unusually slow speed of speech. By capturing these two aspects and comparing it with that of a healthy person, speech distortion will be calculated.

JTremor3D:

PD Progression Index:

My solution will help in following ways:

- Remote monitoring in real time will ensure continuous care of patients with chronic diseases like Parkinson's Disease, Epilepsy and Primary  Orthostatic Tremor

- It will assist in dosage planning, physiotherapy planning

- It will assist conducting remote clinical trials, digital biomarker

- It will help in getting a symptom-controlled life to patients sooner so that they can continue to work and don't get isolated from the society

- It will help in understanding the disease better.

The device's working model is built. User Interface needs to be built. Upon getting some funding support, I can engage a few UI developers and API developers and get the applications developed.

Once it is done, then I will work on getting safety certifications and have the product testing in a few hospitals and clinics.

The device has been receiving wide recognitions and accolades. 3 patents have been filed so far (1 in the US, 2 in India). 

The working model is ready, hence the solution can be considered to be in prototype phase.

It has not been tested on patients. However, it has been validated using patients data of 5800+ patients.

The data was sourced from Kaggle. The data is owned by University of California at Irvine and is based on UPDRS (Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale).

It has been found that PD Progression Index calculated using PDCheck3D is quite accurate for patients in medium and advanced stages of the disease.

Following are the objectives:

- Receive mentorship from Solve experts\

- Seek opportunities to collaborate with other participants and companies

- Seek funding to support the further development

There are a few solutions that are attempting to support the patients of PD, but in a different ways:

- There is a company making gloves to help absorb the tremors so that person shaking hand with patient doesn't feel the tremor

- There is a recent invention regarding using radio wave for tracking of patient movements

However, no solutions I found is doing capture of all observable symptoms and arriving at overall progression of disease. I believe this is an unmet need which I am trying to solve.

3 patents have been filed for the invention. Several awards have been received by the invention so far.

Impact goals for next five years:

1) Year 1: Finish development, get safety certification and have it tested, receive feedback and improve it

2) Year 2: There are about 1million patients of PD in India. I plan to launch the solution to reach all these patients

3) Year 3: I would like to reach out to US and other countries soon after

4) Year 4: Have this a default product for every PD patient

5) Year 5: Try this on Epilepsy and Primary Orthostatic Tremor.

I have made a plan and measuring my progress vis-a-vis that plan:

My solution will assist doctors in knowing the exact status of patient's symptoms and disease progression. It will help them do more accurate dosage planning. Physiotherapists will also been able to plan a more effective physiotherapy if they know the disease progression speed and spread of patient. Having right medication and therapies will ensure that patient will lead a symptom-free life sooner. This will ensure that patients have optimism and continue to work and earn bread and respect in the society instead of feeling isolated.

This will have a positive impact not just on the 10 million new patients of PD that get added to this world, but also on their families and next generations. 

accelerators, gyration sensors, RF transmitters, RF receivers, Raspberri Pi, cloud, app and web technologies

I am a girl from a traditional Indian joint family. Patients are my advisors. I also have built a community of 115+ patients who receive monthly newsletter from me (Recent advancements, Lifestyle tips, good hospitals in area) based on curated information.

Though my product is not launched in the market yet, the business model is two fold:

- Have patients of PD acquire this device and they invite doctors to check out their symptom data

- Doctors can acquire the device and lease it to patient during initial visit or whenever dosage needs to be replanned

- Physiotherapists also can acquire the device and lease it to patient for a couple of weeks

Thus the key customers are patients, doctors and physiotherapists.

The ultimate goal is to ensure that all patients of PD in this world are benefitted. For the enterprise to keep running, I plan to make this financially sustainable in 18 months from the launch.

Focus on business development in a professional way.

Partner with key doctors and hospitals 

Engage with third party healthcare companies for faster adoption