AT AAN 2017
BOSTON (FRONTLINE MEDICAL NEWS) – The developers of a free app that tests mental and physical symptoms in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) report that their software allows the monitoring of responses to treatment.
“We can track markers of medication,” Larsson Omberg, PhD , vice president of systems biology at the nonprofit Sage Bionetworks, said in an interview. “We can statistically predict whether someone has taken their medication or not, and we can even subdivide populations into strong responders to l-dopa and individuals who don’t necessarily have strong responses to medication but have strong fluctuations based on the time of day.”
In an observational study that Dr. Omberg presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology, he and his colleagues tracked 19 months of public usage of the iPhone app called mPower . Since March 2015, the investigators enrolled 12,699 participants who all provided demographic information.
A total of 10,326 participants (86%) served as a control group of people who do not have PD. Their average age was 32 (interquartile range, 23-38). The other 14% of participants (n = 2,373) disclosed that they have PD. Their average age was 60 (IQR, 54-68), and they reported having the disease for an average of 8 years (IQR, 4-10).
Overall, 80% of the control participants were male, as were 64% of the PD participants.
Researchers found that 96% of the PD participants were taking PD medications, and 10% reported having had deep brain stimulation.
Participants were asked to use the app’s surveys and tests to measure things such as tremor, sleep quality, frequency of gait, tapping ability, and voice jitter.
“We ask them to perform these active tasks, things they might do in the clinic,” Dr. Omberg said. “The difference is that we are capturing measurements using the sensors in the phone. It’s relatively easy so we can track changes over a day and from day to day.”
For example, one of the tests measures how quickly users can tap the screen over a 20-second interval. “It is a two-finger tap between two fingers and two buttons on the screen,” Dr. Omberg said. “Finger tapping is associated with the severity of the disease.”
The researchers found that they could track patient variability throughout the day and connect the data to the times when patients took medication. In half of the PD patients, the data showed a correlation between medication use and performance of at least one of five types of activities – gait, balance, voice, memory, and tapping.
The app and the information it has provided have limitations, he said. While one participant has used the app at least three times a day for 2 years, many users tried it out for a short time and became inactive. And while users can access some of their own data, it’s not very helpful yet: “It’s very raw and probably not the most useful to a clinician,” Dr. Omberg said.
Regarding whether the app could be used to reveal early signs of PD, Dr. Omberg cautioned that it wasn’t designed for that purpose. Still, “I’m pretty sure applications like mPower would be technically able to do this at some point in the future,” he said. “But there is a lot of validation work that will have to be done first.”
For now, the app remains available for free for iOS devices, and researchers are working on a new version. Meanwhile, Dr. Omberg said the app is serving as a research tool to collect baseline and trial data in the Safety of Urate Elevation in Parkinson’s Disease (SURE-PD) study , which is examining the use of oral inosine to boost serum urate in PD patients.
The study was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
