The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research (MJFF) and Intel Corporation announced on Wednesday that they are coming together to study the use of wearable devices and a big data analytics platform to aid Parkinson's disease research and treatment.

The devices can gather and analyze data on Parkinson's patients including their slowness of movement, tremor, and sleep quality. The researchers can then use that data to get a better understanding of the progression of the disease and its relationship to molecular changes, which will speed up the time it takes to develop breakthrough drugs.

Right now, researchers have to look through patient diaries that are collected intermittently in order to get that information but with the new technology they can analyze hundreds of readings per second from thousands of patients.
MJFF and Intel started a study earlier this year in order to assess the usability and accuracy of the wearable devices. The researchers had 16 Parkinson's patients and nine control volunteers wear the devices during two clinic visits, and at home continuously for four days.

The Intel data scientists are currently comparing the data collected in the study with clinical observations and patient diaries in order to measure the devices' accuracy. They are also creating algorithms to measure symptoms and disease progression.

In order to analyze the large amount of data — over 300 observations per second from each patient — that goes into the wearable devices, Intel created a big data analytics platform called Cloudera CDH. It's deployed on a cloud infrastructure optimized on Intel architecture.

The platform supports an analytics application created by Intel that processes and detects changes in the data in real time.

The platform might be able to store other kinds of data in the near future including patient, genome, and clinical trial data. Additionally, the platform could enable machine learning and graph analytics, which would allow researchers to use more accurate predictive models to detect changes in disease symptoms.

As a result, researchers will be able to measure the efficacy of new drugs and also help physicians make prognostic decisions.

MJFF and Intel have plans to launch a mobile application later this year that allows patients to report their medication intake and how they are feeling. The next phase of the study will look at the effects of medication on motor systems through changes detected in sensor data from the wearable devices.

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