Intel Corporation wants to use wearable technology to combat Parkinson’s Disease.

While other companies fiddle around with wrist bands designed to improve our fitness or track our heart rates, the chip maker has teamed up with the Michael J Fox Foundation (MJFF) for Parkinson’s Research to try and find a cure for the world’s second-most prevalent neurodegenerative disease.

The effort involves a new Big Data analytics platform built by Intel, which hopes that the swathes of data collected by wearable devices will be able to produce a better record of Parkinson’s sufferers’ symptoms. Using the data they collect, researchers at the Michael J Fox Foundation hope they’ll get new insights into the disease and its drug treatments, which have been difficult to study objectively on a widespread scale in the past.

“Nearly 200 years after Parkinson’s disease was first described by Dr. James Parkinson in 1817, we are still subjectively measuring Parkinson’s disease largely the same way doctors did then,” Todd Sherer, CEO of The Michael J. Fox Foundation, said in a statement. “Data science and wearable computing hold the potential to transform our ability to capture and objectively measure patients’ actual experience of disease, with unprecedented implications for Parkinson’s drug development, diagnosis and treatment.”

The foundation intends to fit out hundreds of Parkinson’s patients around the country with wearable technology. It believes the initiative will help it to reach out to those patients who live far from research facilities, giving it a much wider pool of research.

Intel has been interested in wearables for some time, and is particularly keen to explore what these devices can do to help advance health and science.

“We’re exploring how to pull data out of devices in real-time,” Ron Kasabian, general manager of Intel’s Big Data Solutions group, told Reuters. “We can mine data to improve research, and better understand the behaviors and progression of the disease.”

The multi-phase study will rely on a newly-built Intel Big Data analytics platform that’s designed to detect patterns in the data it collects from patients. The platform runs Cloudera’s CDH deployed on a cloud infrastructure built on Intel’s architecture, and the company says it will repurpose the same platform for other health projects in future, for example in genome research and clinical trials.

Intel and the Michael J. Fox Foundation have already carried out one study to evaluate the usability and accuracy of their werable devices. The test pool consisted of 16 Parkinson’s patients and nine control volunteers, who wore the devices for a period of four days. Intel’s data scientists are now analyzing that data so they can develop algorithms to measure the symptoms and progression of Parkinson’s disease.

The next stage is to design a mobile app patients can use to record data such as their medication intake, symptoms and feelings. This data will then be correlated with imput coming from the wearables.

To learn more about the collaboration between Intel and MJFF, you can watch the promo video below.

photo credit: http://heatherbuckley.co.uk via photopin cc