Reducing clinic visits is more important than ever to help reduce travel during the COVID-19 pandemic. The KinesiaU™ motor assessment system is a prescription app that allows patients to remotely measure their Parkinson’s symptoms using their smartphone and smartwatch. Real-time remote access to patient reports may assist clinicians in making better care decisions for treating their movement disorder symptoms.

When optimizing Parkinson’s therapy, the patient is in the middle of a complex system where drug types, doses, and times interact to create fluctuating patterns of motor symptoms and side effects. Clinical rating scales provide a limited snapshot of symptom severity in the clinic. Likewise, handwritten diaries can be burdensome, leading to inaccurate entries and poor compliance. These limitations can make decisions about medication adjustments challenging and require a costly trial-and-error process. Wearable technology has shown great promise for providing an objective evidence base for clinical decision making. Objective home-based assessment can empower patients with PD to become more involved in their disease management and allow a personalized approach to treatment, ultimately improving symptomatic control and quality of life.

The KinesiaU motor assessment system is a validated, low-cost prescription consumer app for patients to measure their Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorder symptoms using an off-the-shelf smartwatch paired with a smartphone. KinesiaU objectively evaluates tremor, slowness and dyskinesia in response to medication and exercise. In addition to tracking symptoms, the KinesiaU app provides user-friendly reports that the patient can easily share with their clinician to assist in making therapy adjustments to dosing and timing without having to come into the office. This creates better access for patients outside of a clinical setting, which can lead to a higher quality of care, decreased costs and improved compliance for patients.

 

Remote monitoring using Kinesia technology has been shown to
aid in clinical decision making in several clinical studies:

Clinical Study 1

The advanced Parkinson’s therapy (deep brain stimulation or drug pump) referral rate was significantly higher for patients when a clinician had access to Kinesia remote monitoring reports compared to standard care alone. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27392872/

Clinical Study 2

Kinesia reports enabled clinicians to make therapy decisions and observe the symptomatic response to changes in therapy regimens without patients returning to the clinic. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29725667/

Clinical Study 3

Parkinson’s patients who used Kinesia at home over 12-weeks when starting transdermal dopamine agonist rotigotine were titrated to higher dosages, had more dose changes, and experienced improved UPSRS II and UPDRS III scores compared to patients receiving standard care. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30948242/