January: Wearable tech could revolutionise Parkinson’s treatment | News and features

Transforming the Objective Real-world measUrement of Symptoms (TORUS) has received £6M funding from the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council to create the capability to monitor patients many times every day autonomously, continuously, objectively in their own home and for months at a time. This requires data fusion across a set of different sensors in the home.

To get a new drug to market, pharmaceutical companies need to evidence by a clinical trial whether the drug improves symptoms such as freezing when walking, tremor and the ability to undertake daily tasks such as standing up from sitting or moving between rooms.

Currently, to gather this evidence, each patient in the trial must travel to hospital to be observed performing standardised tests by a clinician. However, these (at most) monthly ‘snapshot’ samples of symptoms are a poor representation of the hour-by-hour variation of the patient’s true symptoms. This problem undermines hugely expensive clinical trials to the extent that some large companies have publicly withdrawn from developing new drugs for Parkinson’s disease.

As such, the holy grail of a cure for Parkinson’s disease has been held back for decades by the extreme difficulty of measuring whether proposed new drugs actually improve the patient’s daily symptoms.

Project lead Professor Ian Craddock, based at Bristol’s School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology  commented: “TORUS aims to overcome this problem by using a wrist-worn wearable integrated synergistically with AI-enabled cameras to capture their patient’s physical actions over extended periods. The data from the wearable and cameras will be fused to give metrics of the quality of mobility-related activities. We’re committed to conclude the TORUS programme with a world-first clinical proof of concept.”

Neurological disorders are the single largest cause of disability – in the UK alone there are 150,000 people with Parkinson’s disease, the fastest-growing neurological condition. Tragically, Parkinson’s disease is incurable, and symptoms worsen over time, severely reducing quality of life and creating heavy burdens on the patient’s family.

The cost to the NHS each year is £375M, with families and social services contributing a further £877M (Centre for Health & Social Care Research, 2017). The number of people with Parkinson’s disease in the UK is expected to nearly double by 2040.

This proposal brings together, for the first time, the Digital Health team from Bristol with Newcastle’s Translational and Clinical Research Institute, Open Lab, and National Innovation Centre for Data (NICD). It leverages both the experience of Bristol’s EPSRC-funded SPHERE IRC (total grant £16M, 2013-2022), which has unmatched expertise researching, designing and deploying multi-sensor systems in family homes, and Newcastle’s £50M Mobilise-D IMI project, a multinational collaboration between big pharma and academia.

Read more at www.torus.ac.uk or email TORUS-project@bristol.ac.uk.