IBM partners with Pfizer to measure patents Parkinson’s symptoms in the home
Technology firm IBM has teamed up with drugs giant Pfizer to open up a new front in the battle against Parkinson’s disease by developing a new project seeking to better measure patient symptoms in the home.
A series of sensors have been developed by the team to give them 24/7 data on the day-to-day impact of living with the disease, improving on the partial diagnosis doctors can achieve through only partial observation whilst also eliminating the subjective nature of the people’s own experiences.
Armed with a more complete dataset Pfizer believes it can administer a tailored dose of drugs to individuals designed to treat their unique symptoms in an optimal way.
Ajay Royyuro, director of the Computational Biology Center at IBM Research said: “The solution has to scale. It has as to be robust enough to deploy in patient’s home and simultaneously do that in hundreds or even thousands of homes,” he explained.
“I think there is real opportunity here to make a difference in the lives of patients. I have seen and have close contact with a family member with Parkinson’s and I can see how effective it would be to have this real-time symptomatic measurement and helping them make their lives better.”
An initial trial will take place in a purpose built flat within IBM’s research centre, bristling with hi-tech sensors to measure both patients and healthy volunteers to see how different categories of individual react to this degree of probing.