Adam Zewe | MIT News Office
September 21, 2022

Parkinson’s disease is the fastest-growing neurological disease, now affecting more than 10 million people worldwide, yet clinicians still face huge challenges in tracking its severity and progression.

Clinicians typically evaluate patients by testing their motor skills and cognitive functions during clinic visits. These semisubjective measurements are often skewed by outside factors — perhaps a patient is tired after a long drive to the hospital. More than 40 percent of individuals with Parkinson’s are never treated by a neurologist or Parkinson’s specialist, often because they live too far from an urban center or have difficulty traveling.

In an effort to address these problems, researchers from MIT and elsewhere demonstrated an in-home device that can monitor a patient’s movement and gait speed, which can be used to evaluate Parkinson’s severity, the progression of the disease, and the patient’s response to medication.

Complete article from MIT News.