Intel fights parkinson’s disease with wearable devices, cloud storage

 Behind Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease is the second-most widespread neurodegenerative brain disorder in the world, and affects one out of every 100 people over the age of 60. Teaming up with the Michael J. Fox Foundation, Intel is taking aim at Parkinson’s disease, and is using wearable devices to do it.

Parkinson’s disease was first described in 1817 by Dr. James Parkinson, and since then, the way to measure it has barely changed. Surgery, medications, and management techniques can help relieve symptoms, but there is no cure. Caffeine is thought to help prevent the disease, with an increase in potential prevention coming with an increase in caffeine intake. Tobacco smoke, strangely enough, also may reduce the risk of Parkinson’s by a third when compared to non-smokers — the nicotine may act as a dopamine suppressant. Whatever the cause ends up being for an individual, though, measuring it is often a slow process that doesn’t generate nearly enough data for researchers to make any significant progress. Intel and the Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF) have an idea for speeding up the data collection process: wearable devices, Extremetech reported.
Due to the amount of variables involved in Parkinson’s symptoms — speed of movement, frequency and strength of tremors, how it affects sleep, and so on — the symptoms are difficult and tedious to track. Often, data is accrued through patient diaries, which is a slow process. Wearable devices — Intel will be deploying a smartwatch – can not only increase the rate of data collection, but detect a much higher volume of variables and frequency than a personal diary could. They (mostly) don’t get in the way and can record every data point around the clock, creating a massive amount of data per patient of about 300 observations per second. The use of wearables means that the data can even be reported and monitored by researchers and doctors in real time. Later this year, the MJFF is even planning on launching a mobile app that adds medication intake monitoring and allows patients to record how they feel (making it easier for patients to hand their diaries to doctors and researchers).
In order to collect and manage the data, it will be uploaded to a cloud storage data platform, and has the ability to notice changes in the data in real time. This allows researchers to track the changes in patient symptoms.
While the wearable devices aren’t some kind of sci-fi machine that helps suppress the symptoms of Parkinson’s as they come up, the real-time, around-the-clock monitoring — and subsequent massive amount of data that will create — should help speed up the process of finding some kind of universal treatment or cure.