The tech company is working with the Michael J. Fox Foundation for progress in study and treatment.
The Intel Corporation and the Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF) for Parkinson’s Research have now announced that they will be working together in a new initiative that uses wearable technology to help to improve the research being conducted on the disease and the types of treatments that will be available to those who have it.
This neurodegenerative brain disease is second only to Alzheimer’s in its prevalence in the United States.
This strategy hopes to be a considerable step toward bringing researchers and physicians together in order to be better able to measure the development of Parkinson’s and to be able to speed up the process of improving the development of medications for its treatment. This research study will have a number of different phases, which will make use of a new platform in data analytics that is designed to identify data patterns among study participants. That data will be obtained through the use of wearable technology devices that will continually monitor the symptoms of the wearers.
Wearable technology will provide a new way for the disease to be monitored and understood.
According to Todd Sherer, PhD, the CEO of the MJFF, the disease is currently measured in a way that is essentially the same way as physicians had been doing back in 1817 when it was first described by Dr. James Parkinson. With the help of wearable devices, this could open up an entirely new understanding of the condition and its symptoms.
Sherer explained that “Data science and wearable computing hold the potential to transform our ability to capture and objectively measure patients’ actual experience of disease, with unprecedented implications for Parkinson’s drug development, diagnosis and treatment.”
The senior vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group at Intel, Diane Bryant, also released a statement in which it was explained that it is the unpredictability of Parkinson’s that makes it difficult for experts to be able to monitor its development. However, she also pointed out that through the use of new forms of wearable tech, an entirely new and innovative paradigm can be designed in order to be able to measure the disease, simply because the amount of data available to researchers and physicians becomes far greater.
