Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
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THE classic white clapboard and gleaming windows of the elegant home are straight from the pages of a glossy property magazine. But this suburban house, surrounded by manicured lawns, is wired to beat the scourge of Parkinson’s Disease.
Behind the front door, everything from fridge handles and kitchen cupboards to armchairs and a double bed are fitted with sensors that respond to subtle changes in movement in patients – a crucial indicator in Parkinson’s.
The three-bedroom property is stacked with pressure sensors, motion cameras and computer networks that hum with activity around the clock in a revolutionary project to decode the neurodegenerative disorder.
This is the house of hope, a unique living laboratory where Parkinson’s Disease (PD) patients will stay and have their everyday activities monitored to generate data on how their disease is progressing, or how they respond to novel drugs being developed to treat the condition.
Patients – who could stay for days or weeks depending on various trials – will generate data that could help develop disease-halting drugs and advance technology that could be used at home so that people with Parkinson’s can retain their independence.
It could also herald new equipment for earlier diagnosis and boost the ability of GPS to identify symptoms that are often mistakenly attributed to ageing.
Patients wear sensors and are filmed by cameras mounted on walls or on tripods as they go about daily life – reading, making a drink or meal and walking around the property. Measurements from 25 joint movements track gait, grip, speed and tiny changes in routine, transmitting the data wirelessly to a command suite just off the entrance hall.
The multi-million-pound Bluesky Project – a collaboration between industry giants Pfizer and IBM – is ready to accept its first patient on a clinical trial at the house in upstate New York, USA.
But the project is driven by emotional as well as technological imperatives as the leading clinicians involved all have family members whose lives were blighted by Parkinson’s.
Ajay Royyuru, vice-president healthcare and life sciences IBM Research, revealed that a female relative had struggled with the condition: “It is an unrelenting disease. Every day, minute by minute, they get no relief and my relative has gone through quite a bit,” he says.
“She now deals with it well but when I look at the work we are doing here I feel we have a chance to make a big difference for people like her.”
Jeremy Rice, principal researcher and senior manager at IBM Research, revealed that his 83-year-old father Roger was diagnosed with Parkinson’s two years ago.
“This is very personal for me,” he says. “It is a scary thing and if you go to the doctor every six months with your Parkinson’s, it is very episodic so it would be reassuring to be able to track it continuously.
“The project excites me because there is so much that technology can assist people with and make their lives better. This is very important to us.
“Our work gives tremendous hope for Parkinson’s and also other cognitive conditions such as Alzheimer’s if we can broaden the technology in the future.”
PD is a progressive condition, caused by a lack of the brainsignalling chemical dopamine, which has five sub-types and 30 separate genetic factors at play. It is a curse to 127,000 people and their families in the UK and 10 million worldwide.
Every hour someone in the UK is told they have Parkinson’s. There is no cure and the gold standard medication, Levodopa, was introduced 50 years ago. A study recently warned that PD numbers could double by 2025 because of our ageing UK population, with the cost to the
NHS soon rising to above £1billion a year.
Its personal payload is devastating with extensive symptoms including tremors and slow movement, pain, anxiety, depression, sleep disturbance, bladder problems, sexual dysfunction and an inability to lead an independent life. It has been described as a living death.
Comedian Sir Billy Connolly has been living with it since 2013 and singer Neil Diamond ended his 50th anniversary tour in January because of his advancing Parkinson’s.
The best available medication only treats the symptoms, becoming less effective over time, and trials of new drugs have been hampered by the inability to define condition changes that vary from person to person. “It is a family disease,” said Pet Pfizer’s head of quantitativ is slow, insidious and peopl it are often in the prime of th golden years as they slo capacity to move easily and “They have to think abo they take. They start to sha do daily things like doing tying shoelaces. There is a fear of what is happening to first things that go are w together. “Couples can no l those t together a pleasure a becomes web of go not bein too much The