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.

One of the most difficult aspects of monitoring Parkinson’s disease (PD) motor symptoms, is that the severity of tremor and bradykinesia (slowed movements) greatly fluctuates throughout the day.

When medication is at its peak effectiveness, the patient is said to be “On.” Similarly, when medication has completely worn off, the subject is said to be “Off.” Symptoms are often worst first thing in morning, but improve after the first dose of medication. However, as the medication wears off, symptoms return mid-day. These cycles of waxing and waning motor symptoms continue throughout the day. Controlling these “On” and “Off” cycles can be difficult, as patients with PD are typically evaluated in the neurologists’ office, which only allows the physician to capture a snapshot of motor symptoms. Furthermore, patients typically are instructed to refrain from taking medication the night prior to the office visit. A state of anxiety in this condition may amplify PD symptoms during motor evaluation. Monitoring motor symptoms at home would provide clinicians with improved tracking of these complex motor fluctuations and in-turn optimize medication dose to improve patient quality of life.

Kinesia is a compact wireless system developed by CleveMed to quantify movement disorder symptoms. In clinical trials, Kinesia objectively quantified tremor and bradykinesia in PD patients in the clinic. Objective symptom ratings output by the Kinesia system were highly correlated to clinician ratings. CleveMed has recently begun a clinical study in which the Kinesia system is being used throughout the day, at home, by patients with PD. Preliminary results demonstrate that Kinesia can capture the “On” and “Off” motor symptom fluctuations in a subject’s home. Monitoring PD symptoms on a more continuous basis at a patient’s home should improve clinical outcomes and decrease costs especially for disparate patient populations in areas not in close proximity to movement disorder specialists.