Months of unknowing, discomfort, and worry culminate in diagnosis. In medical certainty, and personal uncertainty. Even as healthcare practitioners work to allay anxieties, provide details, and speak to treatment options, patients are already working to accept a new normal. They have been told that they are in the process of surrendering something they’ve had for their entire lives: control of their body. The predictability on which they have predicated their lives has been shattered.
Friends and family band together. They call, they worry, they make inquiries about treatment plans that have yet to be put in place. They provide support and comfort.
What will my life be like?
What can I do? What can’t I do?
Daily chores and routines begin to take longer than they did before. Activities like walking, dressing, and preparing a meal shift from automatic movements to fatigue inducing trials as tremors worsen. There are good days, and bad days.
A medication management system commences. No pharmaceutical solution will cure the patient’s Parkinson’s disease, but can aid in reducing some of the more distressing symptoms, at least in the short term. Overtime however, even a drug regime that aims to help can be a source of stress. Side effects explained by a pharmacist slowly shift from acutely unsettling, to expected daily realities, but a routine of symptom relief begins to build.
How will I tell my partner? I don’t want my partner to be my caretaker, how can I shield them from that?
People fight through the symptoms, play within the boundaries of their fatigue, and refuse to let their tremors dictate their lives. They settle into new everyday patterns with their friends and family, they work with their care teams to find treatment regimes that work best for them.
Will I lose my sense of self?
While people living with Parkinson’s disease may invite the people they care about as closely into their new lived experience as possible, their circle of care will never truly be able to understand that physical experience. Until now, symptom simulators for movement disorders like Parkinson’s have been based around mechanical vibrations, but have not accurately simulated the symptom experience on a muscular level. However, Klick Labs has developed technology that simulates the electrical muscle activity seen in movement disorder symptoms. In the past, feeling a loved one’s tremors was an impossibility, but Klick’s SymPulse™ tele-empathy device has made that experience a reality.
SymPulse™ allows those living with movement disorders to share a greater understanding of their condition, by allowing their network of care to feel their tremors for the first time. This experience generates empathy and insights that were previously unattainable.
For the friends and family of people affected by Parkinson’s disease, they are finally able to step inside their loved one’s experience, and understand how their tremors affect their activities of daily living. Not only does this deeper level of understanding ease the pain of disconnect between patient and caregiver, but the technology behind SymPulse™ has the potential to revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of Parkinson’s.
Rather than building symptom management programs in reaction to specific presentations, SymPulse™ could be capable of transforming treatment models through machine-learning based medication management. Moreover, once a large library of digitized movement disorder tremors is compiled, specialists may be able to employ data-based diagnostic tools that will remove the guesswork and uncertainty from an already stressful diagnostic process.
SymPulse™ opens up a world to movement disorder patients wherein they are no longer alone in their symptom experience, leading to support systems that are more understanding than ever before.
The SymPulse™ tele-empathy device is a patent-pending technology developed by Klick Labs, the in-house consulting service for strategic innovation at Klick Health. Founded with a mission to uncover the future of digital medicine, Klick Labs engages a leading multi-disciplinary team of data scientists, engineers, medical imaging specialists, behavioural scientists, and more. Klick Labs experiments with wearable computing, 3D printing, virtual reality, and augmented reality.
1 - Parkinson’s Foundation. http://parkinson.org/Understanding-Parkinsons/Causes-and-Statistics/Statistics. Accessed September 18, 2017..