Technology and Health
How Technology Redefines Parkinson’s Care and Empowers Patients
Assistive technologies' caring and healing touch can revolutionize the Parkinson’s patient experience.
Parkinson’s disease is a progressive neurological disorder that affects movement and can cause tremors, rigidity, and difficulty with coordination and balance. There are numerous challenges and opportunities that technology can fill the gap.
For example, as pointed out in this review paper, currently, Parkinson’s disease lacks established and dependable markers for diagnosis or progression tracking, relying instead on clinical observations for definition. The paper focuses on technology-based objective measures (TOMs).
“Traditionally, clinical scales and traditional patient-reported outcomes are employed for assessment in clinical practice and PD-related research. Nevertheless, TOMs can improve the accuracy, sensitivity, reproducibility, and practicality of capturing a broad spectrum of changes in motor and non-motor behaviors linked to PD.”
As pointed out in the review, “technology-based objective measures can tackle challenges like assessing fluctuating events, capturing rare incidents like falls or freezing of gait, and…
