App holds out hope for range of diseases

PIONEERING RESEARCH by academics in Sheffield to monitor how multiple sclerosis affects walking in daily life could help people with a range of conditions, including Parkinson’s Disease.

The effectiveness of treatments and the progress of a disease could be monitored more effectively using the algorithm developed by researchers at the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, researchers say.

When paired with wearable sensors, it allows data to be collected on how patients walk in “real life” – something that is usually only possible to carry out in laboratories.

Doctors at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals approached the University to help find a way to measure how patients walk in everyday life.

Assessing gait is often used as an indicator in the early stages of MS, which affects 100,000 people in the UK – and over 75 per cent of them have mobility problems.

Dr Claudia Mazzà, a researcher based at the Insigneo Institute for in silico Medicine at the University, said: “The measurements we take of people with MS in a lab may not be an accurate representation of their everyday condition. Having data from real life scenarios will help clinical staff assess a patient’s condition more accurately. For patients this will mean better treatment as a result of clinicians being more informed about their condition.”

Head of care and services research at the MS Society, Imogen Scott Plummer, said: “Being able to monitor mobility with wearable tech as accurately as you could in a lab is a great step forwards – and could be a really useful tool for people with MS and the healthcare professionals treating them, for example, by adding information to a clinical trial, or helping us understand how well a drug works.”