One of the most ambitious projects related to telemedicine in Europe is the REMPARK (Personal Health Device for the Remote and Autonomous Management of Parkinson’s Disease), initiated three years ago and is already close to its final stage after being tested with 50 patients in environments of their day to day, not in controlled by clinical or laboratory.
With EU funding of more than 5 million euro and equipment coordination in several countries, its objective is doubly hopeful: collect data and monitor patients with Parkinson’s disease in their day to day in a real environment and offer solutions on the spot in the moments in which the patient presents locks or other symptoms of the disease.
Register but also real-time stimulation
The REMPARK system consists of a belt that is included in a unit the size of a mobile phone and which incorporates a number of sensors that determine the position/phase of the patient at all times, identifying by the movement of the symptomatological parameters of the illness. The system is capable of evaluating the phase in which the patient is while walking or in their daily life.
This real-time monitoring is essential in the Parkinson patient, as the engine varies of the various patient even ends on the same day, without parameters. That is why the first part of the project is already being helpful for personalized treatment of patients.
But they have also achieved good results when doing a performance in real time. For this reason, the belt also includes auditory sensory stimulators and other electrical stimulation, which after receiving data from the drive symptomatology, it is capable of a stimulation of auditory type by sonorous rhythms in a cordless handset that for example get a patient off the state that occurs when there is a low level of the medication.
That first level has a mobile phone as a liaison between the receiver units and actuator. On a second level, we have a central server where the data collecting unit symptomatology are stored and analyzed to understand the evolution of the patient. Based on that history can be accurate record of the operation of certain treatments and an almost immediate decision making by the medical team.