NeuroInsights: Empowering patients with Parkinson's disease in their personalised care pathway

Evolution figures and course of Parkinson's disease

Worldwide, 10 million people suffer from Parkinson's disease (PD) and this number is likely to double in the next 20 years. No cure is yet possible. PD is the fastest-growing neurodegenerative disease and is complex because more than 60 symptoms can occur. A tailored care pathway is therefore crucial for the patient's quality of life.

Limited follow-up of patients with Parkinson's

The problem is that the standard care path for a person diagnosed with Parkinson's includes only 2 visits per year to the neurologist. This is exacerbated by a growing shortage of trained PD neurologists.

These limited touch points between patient, neurologist and other healthcare providers can delay the adjustment of the personalised care pathway. This affects the patient's quality of life and unnecessarily increases health costs. This places a huge burden on patients, their families and the healthcare system.

NeuroInsights offers customised digital care pathway

NeuroInsights offers a digital health platform to connect the patient's daily life with the interdisciplinary team of healthcare providers and clinicians. This platform collects data from:

• patient-centric, non-intrusive motion capture technologies;
• patient-reported outcomes;
• speech analytics;
• wearables.

We then create insights to ... detect.

• specific events;
• disease progression;
• treatment effectiveness.

This allows the team of caregivers to adapt the care pathway for a better quality of life at a lower burden.

Results research project

Based on a literature review (state-of-the-art), a number of highly discriminating acoustic speech biomarkers were selected for further development into a useful algorithm.

A protocol was drawn up with a number of standardised speech tasks to be performed by persons with Parkinson's disease. In this way, the biomarkers can be reliably extracted from the speech language and then integrated into NeuroPath's larger health platform. Thus, this speech information can also be used to paint a picture of the disease progression of persons with Parkinson's.

The implementation of the entire speech module is currently in its infancy, but other parts of NeuroPath's digital health platform are already ready for use by persons with Parkinson's and their loved ones.