Great Lakes NeuroTechnologies announced today that they are launching the latest version of their medical device technology for assessing Parkinson’s disease next week at the Movement Disorders Society Congress in Dublin, Ireland.
The Kinesia HomeView™ system includes patient-worn motion sensors and a tablet computer to quantitatively assess tremor, bradykinesia, and dyskinesia associated with Parkinson’s disease and in response to treatments. Physicians utilize a web interface to setup patient studies and track symptom responses over the course of the day. Market applications include both in-clinic and home-based telemedicine patient care, programming deep brain stimulation, and providing quantitative endpoints to determine efficacy of clinical trials.
The latest system infrastructure includes several key technology updates to improve the telemedicine experience for Parkinson’s patients, physicians, and researchers. First, the patient take-home kit supports broadband data transfer directly from a patient’s home to a secure server. This allows physicians and researchers immediate online access to real-time symptom reports and video diaries.
Next, miniature, patient-worn motion sensors are instrumented with wireless communications. This minimizes setup time and patient burden during home-based assessments.
Finally, physicians and researchers can use their own tablets to view web-based reports. Color-coded mapping provides intuitive, quantitative tools to document symptom severity and motor fluctuations.
“As broadband and wireless technologies have matured along with the tablet PC market, our development team has been able to successfully integrate them into the Kinesia platform”, said Greg Ferreri, Software Engineering Manager. “By listening to our customers’ requirements, we have used the latest development tools to improve the patient and physician experience for telemedicine and clinical trials.”