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.

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.

Just in case you did not know: In CleveMed’s Movement Disorders Division we design and manufacture medical devices to help study movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. As an ongoing process in development, we’re always interested in receiving feedback to gain additional insight in movement disorders, especially from those using our devices. Some of you have participated in some of our research projects in the past (like one of our medical devices being currently developed with local hospitals, which uses a small wireless motion sensor placed on the finger to record symptoms of Parkinson’s disease).

CleveMed has established a Movement Disorder Focus Group for individuals diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and we are inviting you to join. As a participant, you’ll be in the know about future opportunities to get hands-on experience with our medical devices, test them out, and provide valuable feedback. Sessions are about an hour long, and allow you to learn more about how we are working to improve patient therapies. Lunch is always on us!

If you are interested in joining our Movement Disorder Focus Group call us at 216-361-5423 and ask for the focus group coordinator.

PS: CleveMed is located at 4415 Euclid Ave Cleveland, OH 44103. We look forward to seeing you at the CleveMed Movement Disorder Focus Group!

Sincerely,
Thomas Mera
Senior Biomedical Research Engineer

The Movement Disorders Division of CleveMed has primarily focused on monitoring motor symptoms associated with Parkinson’s disease (PD). A more common movement disorder is essential tremor (ET), which affects approximately 4% of the population over age 40 in the United States. In Parkinson’s disease, tremor (involuntary shaking) occurs primarily at rest, but essential tremor is mainly characterized by tremor of a moving limb.

Measuring Tremor

Subjective Rating: Tremor associated with essential tremor is traditionally rated by various subjective tremor rating scales. These scales all provide a discrete, subjective symptom rating at a discrete point in time. They require a clinician to visually assess the patient, and cannot capture complex fluctuations that occur throughout the day in response to interventions.

Objective Rating: Objectively capturing essential tremor symptoms continuously during daily activities, and using adaptive algorithms to both classify tremor types and severity, could help clinicians better adjust therapy to minimize symptom fluctuations, and expand care to rural and underserved populations. Therefore, CleveMed has recently begun development on a system to objectively monitor essential tremor.

CleveMed previously developed a compact wireless system, Kinesia™, to quantify Parkinson’s disease symptoms. In a clinical study, this system successfully demonstrated objective quantification of Parkinson’s disease motor symptoms. These promising results for Parkinson’s disease suggest the system may be adapted for quantifying tremor in essential tremor patients by developing specific ET algorithms. More continuous portable monitoring can capture the tremor fluctuations that can occur throughout the day. Using a combination of accelerometers and gyroscopes will provide a system with much greater sensitivity for tremor type discrimination and severity rating. (Existing systems contain only a single-axis accelerometer). Continuous ratings throughout the day can aid clinicians and researchers in therapy development and optimizing symptom management for patients with essential tremor.