First Wearable Actuation and Monitoring System for Parkinson’s Patients

The first wearable actuation and monitoring system to monitor movements in Parkinson’s patients has been designed by the Technical Research Centre for Dependency, Care and Autonomous Living (CETpD) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya • BarcelonaTech (UPC).

The phase that the patient is in will also be determined by the system while doing routine activities or while walking and a cue will be provided to initiate movement in case a gait-freezing episode occurs. The project named Personal Health Device for the Remote and Autonomous Management of Parkinson’s Disease (REMPARK), is a European telemedicine project with a budget estimate of €4.73 million. The key objective of the project is to improve the life of Parkinson’s patients.

The two components included in REMPARK are a bracelet with a sensor for determining tremor in the patients and a biocompatible material belt with an inertial system to be worn at the waist. The inertial system, the size of a mobile phone, comprises an array of sensors and can wirelessly transmit and process the collected data. Symptomatic parameters of the disease are sensed by the system as well as on-off phenomena, freezing and other disorders are detected.

Patients with the disease have fluctuations in their motor status, which is termed as on-off phenomena. When they are under medication or “on” phenomena, they are normal and active but sometimes there is slowness in movement, difficulty in walking and freezing of gait termed as “off” phenomena. Sometimes the patient may not be able to move at all termed as freezing which can occur for a time of a few seconds to several minutes.

An actuation subsystem is also present in the REMPARK system comprising haptic, visual or auditory cueing devices, a pump for controlled subcutaneous delivery, and a functional electrical stimulation (FES) system. A mobile phone will connect the actuation and monitoring systems, thus providing a medical supervision interface and connecting the system to the data server. At the next level, a central server will store, process and analyze all the patients’ data to track the progress of each individual patient. It will also support decisions to be taken by the medical team.

The project will continue till 2015 and is expected to offer social, medical and economic benefits.

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