Michael J Fox pledges £100,000 to university to develop Parkinson’s app
to the Future star Michael J Fox has pledged more than £100,000 in funding toward the UK development of a new system for monitoring Parkinson’s Disease sufferers’ symptoms.
The Hollywood actor, who lives with the long-term degenerative disorder of the central nervous system, founded The Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (MJFF). The foundation has awarded a University of London researcher the funding to back his app-based concept.
Fox was diagnosed with young-onset Parkinson’s in 1991. He founded the MJFF in 2000, and the foundation has since then awarded more than USD $750 million in research funding (£530m).
Prof George Roussos, from Birkbeck’s School of Business, Economics and Informatics, developed smartphone and wearable-device apps in 2013 that are able to record Parkinson’s sufferers’ motor symptoms; including tremors, rigidity and posture instability.
The app was designed to be used by patients at home, allowing them to record their own movements such as by tapping their smartphone screen to assess their speed reflexes, or by placing the phone on their knee to measure tremors. The data recorded by the phone’s sensors would then help calculate the severity of a symptom using the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS).
The funding will enable Prof Roussos to develop a software toolkit that would be used to analyse data from his cloudupdrs apps, which researchers will use towards clinical assessments.
The app is currently undergoing clinical trials at Univerback sity College London Hospitals, and the toolkit extension will be released freely to the Parkinson’s Disease research community to support therapeutic development research and clinical trials.
Prof Roussos said monitoring a Parkinson’s patient’s progression required very frequent testing of their motor symptoms, which could be affected by their diet and exercise regime, as well as by social interactions.