CleveMed Blogs

Hello! My name is Danielle Madere, a recent graduate from Illinois Institute of Technology with a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering. In the past month, I was lucky to join the CleveMed family as their newest biomedical engineer.

My first two weeks on the job consisted of gaining familiarity with some of our devices: Kinesia, KinetiSense, and the BioRadio. There was also much training, many meetings, and assisting with grant writing.

In the coming months, I will be focusing a lot of my time on clinical studies for several movement disorder monitoring products that we are currently focusing on, specifically ETSense, ParkinStep, and PDRemote. I will be organizing meetings with patients, collecting symptom data, and performing some preliminary analysis to ensure the data we are collecting is valid.

I am very excited to work with CleveMed’s Movement team because I truly believe that our devices, such as Kinesia HomeView, will revolutionize the way clinicians treat movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. Presently, Parkinson’s disease symptoms are rated by the clinician, based solely on the clinician’s subjective opinion of the severity (UPDRS). Additionally, clinicians only see the patient for a very limited window of time in their office, which does not provide significant insight into the symptoms a patient faces at home, where treatment really matters. Kinesia HomeView will allow clinicians to observe the quality of life of a patient throughout the course of a day in the comfort of their own home, and adjust medication doses and frequency accordingly.

The more closely I interact with Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor patients, the more desperately I want to help improve their quality of life, and CleveMed gives me that opportunity, which I am eternally grateful for.

To see how Mic Iver RPSGT saves the night once again: www.clevemed.com/adventureRPSGT

On a less playful note:
DreamPort is a recently launched accessory to the Sapphire PSG system. Now sleep technicians can take full PSG to the patient wherever they are located (especially if they can’t make it to the sleep lab), and remotely attend/monitor patients via the internet.

In recent years, exercise has steadily received more attention for its benefits in Parkinson’s disease (PD). Not only improving general health, but also alleviating PD-specific motor symptoms such as tremor and bradykinesia. Refer to previous blog entry to learn more about the progression of treatment options for PD patients as the disease advances and the potential benefits and advantages of incorporating exercise into the daily routine.

Continued efforts in research studies are being performed across the country to understand the neurophysiological link between exercise and PD-specific motor symptoms. However, clinicians are also promoting exercise to encourage patients in taking a more proactive role in their treatment. One such example, Drs. Riley and Walter at the University Hospital (Cleveland, OH) are hosting the Parkinson’s Disease Boot Camp, a hands-on learning experience highlighting exercise techniques from experts in the field (physical training, rehabilitation, dance, yoga, etc). The event will be held on Saturday May 22nd, 2010. For more information, click here!

CleveMed will also be participating in the event, using our Kinesia™ system to rate participants before and after exercise. Kinesia uses motion sensor technology to evaluate PD motor symptoms and advanced algorithms to automatically generate severity scores.