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.

Tags: Bayor University, Dr. Joe Jankovic, Essential Tremor, kinesia, Movement Disorder Society Annual Meeting, parkinson's disease, TETRAS, UPDRS

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 9:49 am and is filed under Movement Disorders. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.