The Pulse, May 2019
The Pulse — Improving Parkinson’s Care 💪
As May passes by, we are settling nicely into our new office. We shared a few pictures to the last post if you’re curious.
More importantly, what happened in May on our road in improving Parkinson’s care through technology. Let’s crack on…
User Analysis 🔬
We have been interviewing more and more people affected by Parkinson’s and have uncovered a number of key themes on how different people manage their Parkinson’s. The result of these conversations was a number of different user personas. Not sure what that is? 🤔
Well…a user persona is basically a fictional representation of someone who would use our product. We created these to give us a better idea for the types of people we are designing for. Here is one of them just below:
In keeping with our mantra of transparency and sharing, we have given you more detailed information on the design process in a separate article! That way, we can all be on the same page. 😊
Improving Care Efficiency 📈
Since the start of the year, we’ve been running a medical trial in partnership with Charité hospital in Berlin. The goal of the trial is to reduce the time that the patient would normally spend at the hospital in order to get their medication dosage evaluated. Here’s how it went…
With the approval of the hospital and of the trial participants, we gave out a few of our Flytta wristwatches for people with Parkinson’s to wear during their visits to the clinic. We then had them perform a short motor symptom assessment to see if they needed their medication dosage to be adjusted.
We asked them to carry out a series of basic motor tasks taken from the UPDRS (Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale). In parallel, we had those same motor tasks scored by the clinician. Using the motion data gathered from the wristwatch, we then trained a machine learning model to try and infer the score a clinician would give a task. Currently, the results are very promising, reaching 90% scoring accuracy! 💡
A mini-triumph that shows how technology can improve Parkinson’s care by delivering valuable medical insights to the patient whilst alleviating the load on our healthcare systems. 💪
The Ray Kennedy Cup ⚽️
We were very excited to hear about a number of people in YOPD community have got together a football team to enter into this year’s Ray Kennedy Cup in Copenhagen. For those who don’t know, an international 7-a-side football tournament for people living with Parkinson’s.
Check it out here — http://www.raykennedycup.dk/
This year we will be sponsoring UKYOPD FC in their efforts to take the cup home on August 31st. You can show your support by giving them a tweet!
Building the Community 🎤
May was another great month for meeting members of the PD community and getting constructive feedback on how to improve the product. Our visits took us to the south-west of England where we met with people from Hobbs Rehabilitation and to Potsdam where we met members of the German Parkinson’s Association! These meetings really help us in steering the product’s development so if you are an actor in the Parkinson’s care ecosystem, we would love to speak with you! 😊
You can reach us via contact [at] medengine.co
Want to know when we launch? 🚀
You can get notified when the product is available by signing up to our waiting list. The list is growing which is super motivating for the team!
👉👉👉 Sign up here! 👈👈👈
You’ll receive the very occasional update on our progress to just keep you in the loop!
