A Wearable Device Is Changing the Way Clinicians Manage Parkinson & #039;s Patients

A recently published study in Functional Neurology suggests that using data from an FDA-cleared watch-like device called the Personal KinetiGraph (PKG) provides an objective and more effective approach to assessing motor fluctuations in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) compared with patient-reported motor diaries. “Motor fluctuations, including 'wearing-off' and dyskinesia, are associated with increased disease severity and disability, and PD patients experience decreased quality of life as their response to medical therapy becomes less predictable,” said Echo Tan, MD, a neurologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and lead author on the publication. “Effectively managing motor fluctuations is complicated by the lack of objective assessment tools, leading patients and physicians to rely on direct observation in the clinic or patient reports, which may be unrevealing, incomplete and unreliable. The results of our study demonstrate that the fluctuation score calculated by the PKG system provides objective quantification of motor fluctuations." This may help improve the routine management of Parkinson's patients and enable more objective assessments in clinical trials of Parkinson's therapies, she said. Tan told MD+DI the study revealed that the PKG system (developed by Global Kinetics) and the algorithms for calculating a fluctuator score can differentiate between non-dyskinetic and dy...
Source: MDDI - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: Digital Health Source Type: news