Teva Pharmaceuticals’ collaboration with Intel this week to develop a way to track Huntington’s disease patients through a combined platform of wearables and machine learning platform is a fascinating development. The partnership underscores the pharma industry’s growing interest in using digital health to develop a more complete understanding of patient populations to advance drug development. Neurodegenerative diseases represent a particularly interesting area for wearables to come into play as clinicians and researchers seek to better understand disease progression.
The point is to get a fuller picture of patients between doctor appointments. The machine learning component is designed to make sense of the enormous amount of data the study will gather.
As part of the sub-study within an ongoing Phase 2 Open-Pride HD Study, patients will use a smartphone and wear a smartwatch equipped with sensing technology to continuously measure their general functioning and movement, a news release said. That data will be streamed to a platform developed by Intel to analyze data from the smartwatches and score patients according to motor symptom severity. The study will start later this year in centers in the U.S. and Canada.
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The Michael J Fox Foundation is currently recruiting for a pilot study of Parkinson’s disease patients to evaluate the feasibility and compliance for patients to use wearable sensors to improve understanding of disease progression. It involves deploying a Pebble smartwatch and fall detector to participants. The study will also assess activity level, medication intake and mood. The study at Radboud University in the Netherlands includes Philips Research and Intel Corp. as collaborators, a description of the study on ClinicalTrials.Gov noted.
The Sync Project, an initiative from PureTech, is interested in using music therapy to help people with a wide range of conditions, including movement disorders. Led by Marko Ahtisaari, the former head of product development at Nokia, The Sync Project has developed a series of studies to validate music therapy data in different patient populations. It also plans to release an app later this year as part of a crowdsourced study to assess the biometric effect of music on things like heart rate, sleep patterns and gait by looking at beat, depth of rhythm, key, the kind of instruments used in the tunes. The Sync Project has partnered with wearables developers such as Jawbone, Fitbit, Basis watch, Apple watch. One goal of the project is to produce a research platform that has the potential to accelerate the discovery of clinical applications for music in a health conditions that include Parkinson’s Disease and stroke recovery.
Photo: Pebble
