CleveMed Blogs

CleveMed has collaborated with Dr. Joe Jankovic at the Baylor University Parkinson’s Disease Center and Movement Disorders Clinic using CleveMed’s Kinesia device for essential tremor symptom evaluations. Kinesia is currently used for Parkinson’s disease symptom evaluations but this study may help broaden the potential applications the device can be used for.

The current methods of evaluating essential tremor symptom severity are the Essential Tremor (ET) clinical rating scales. These are similar to the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale in which a visual assessment by a clinician produces a numeric score that correlates to symptom severity. Recently, the Tremor Research Group developed The Essential Tremor Rating Assessment Scale, or TETRAS, for the assessment of action tremor in ET. The TETRAS scale utilizes a half point interval, 0 to 4 scale to rate symptom severity.

In this study, our collaborators at Baylor University compared the output of Kinesia to the scores assigned to patients using the TETRAS for upper extremity postural and kinetic tremor. More information on the methods used are available on this poster, which was presented at the Movement Disorder Society Annual Meeting in June 2009, Paris France: Read here. The study concluded that there was a significant correlation between the TETRAS score and the output of the Kinesia system and that the system may provide a useful adjunct to the current subjective rating scales.

Immediately after a lunch meeting, David Sullivan (CleveMed Software Quality Engineer) tweeted: Interesting presentation on sleep science during lunch by Dr. Robert Thomas. Ilya Gotfryd (Software Engineer), from a nearby cubicle, promptly echoed: Came back from an exciting sleep science presentation. Starting to view sleep as a window. The CleveMed Twitter page announced: “Fascinating lunch meeting presentation by Dr. Robert Thomas (BIDMC, a Harvard Medical School affiliate) on ‘Sleep as Window’”. Although the lunch-time talk was much-tweeted about by the CleveMed team, it was not the main focus of Dr. Thomas’ visit.

Dr. Robert Thomas of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center was in Cleveland this week to partner with CleveMed in developing and commercializing a new therapeutic technology for sleep apnea. Sleep apnea has many forms, like Obstructive (OSA), Central (CSA), and Complex (CompSA). OSA is the only form with an effective treatment - Continuous Positive Airway Pressure – CPAP. However, CSA and CompSA, which are strongly linked to serious heart and lung diseases remain largely untreated. It is suspected that more than 25% of Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) patients have CSA or CompSA. Furthermore, Central or Complex apnea events often coexist with OSA, which can compromise the effectiveness of the popular CPAP therapy.

The technology, which was created by Dr. Robert Thomas at BIDMC, Boston and Mr. Robert W. Daly of Wellesley, Massachusetts, is based on injecting small amounts of CO₂ levels into the patient while applying CPAP. A major contributor to CSA and CompSA is thought to be an increased sensitivity to CO₂ levels, which causes central apneas readily when the patients fall asleep. This is especially true during CPAP since the increase in breathing lowers CO₂ in those patients; thus, triggering central apnea. “By introducing 0.5% to 1% of CO₂ during CPAP, we have found that the patient′s normal breathing is restored“, said Dr. Thomas. “The key is to prevent a drop in CO₂; there is no need to increase CO₂ above wake levels. The implications are huge. Not only will such technology bring relief of symptoms to CSA and CompSA patients, but may also improve cardiac function itself, as the restoration of normal breathing may relieve stresses on the heart. The project with CleveMed will test the benefit on patients with and without CHF and both CSA and CompSA.”

Technology completion and clinical validation on more than 100 patients will be supported by a recent NIH SBIR Fast Track grant awarded to CleveMed with BIDMC and Wayne State University as the two clinical sites.

This post is an adaptation from CleveMed News Release: CleveMed to Collaborate with Robert Thomas MD on New Sleep Apnea Therapy

The CleveMed Sleep Team is at Sleep 2009 in Seattle, WA at Booth #929. Doors opened just a few hours ago and the team is very excited to present the pioneering concept of PSG Anywhere^™ to expand the reach of your sleep services.

Stop by and meet the team at Booth #929. And while you’re there, fill out a card for your chance to win an Amazon Kindle! The drawing for the winning card will be held at noon on Wednesday (June 10, 2009).

CleveMed will also be launching DreamPort^™ (coming soon), which expands the reach of your sleep by allowing remotely attended sleep studies to be done from virtually anywhere –over the internet! For the first time, the technologist can remotely monitor the patient data and video in real-time from almost any location using an extremely user-friendly and portable bedside system. DreamPort is ideal for testing patients who may have difficulty coming to the sleep lab and allows for cost effective research studies in patient homes.

Make sure to follow CleveMed at Sleep 2009 on Twitter at http://twitter.com/CleveMed. Check out what a fellow-tweeter said: ikg_agent@CleveMed Much victory…Booth #929 the way of the future