There are estimated to be some 10 million people living with Parkinson’s Disease worldwide. Vital@home, an EIT Digital Innovation Activity, aims to help delay or prevent the deterioration of Parkinson’s symptoms and to maintain the quality of life for those with the disease.
The work aims to reduce the cost burdens on the social healthcare system by reducing hospital visits and the workload of care personnel. Through the use of unobtrusive wearables, sensor-based disease symptom assessment will provide useful information enabling the optimisation of treatments and cutting the costs of managing the disease.
Heribert Baldus, activity lead from Philips Research explained: “Parkinson’s patients suffer from movement disorders and need long-term disease management and treatment.
Clinical professionals often lack objective and accurate assessments of the disease’s progression because it’s often based on incidental hospital visits. Innovative and optimised health data sources can provide a much more informed basis for improved disease management.”
The solution consists of wearable sensors integrated in a cloud-based application to provide objective and continuous movement assessments of Parkinson’s Disease patients, based on which optimal individualised disease management can be provided.
The Vital@Home Innovation Activity forms part of EIT Digital’s Digital Wellbeing Action Line. The work is being led by Philips and includes subgrantees such as RadboudUMC (subgrant via Philips), TU Berlin, Curamatik (subgrant via TU Berlin) and UCL London.
EIT Digital seeks to generate significant innovations from top European research. As such, we focus our investments on a limited number of innovation areas known as Innovation Action Lines, that we have selected with respect to their European relevance and leadership potential.
Each Innovation Action Line comprises a portfolio of activities including:
- open innovation activities carried out by the EIT Digital Partners, and
- fast-growing technology startups that are ready to scale commercially.
Our innovation activities deliver new products or services, create startups and spinoffs to commercialise outputs from projects, and encourage the transfer of technologies for market entry.
The Digital Wellbeing Action Line leverages digital technologies to stay healthy (prevention and early detection) or cope with an existing chronic condition. Both physical and mental wellbeing are considered.
The solutions generally rely on enabling consumers to be well-informed about their wellbeing and to be able to use digital instrumentation to monitor and improve their quality of life, according to the motto “an ounce of prevention is worth at least a pound of cure”.
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