Israel Intel’s analytics team collects big-data analytics and data from wearable computing to improve monitoring and treatment of Parkinson\’s disease.
When the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson\’s Research and Intel Corporation announced their collaboration on a project to improve research and treatment for Parkinson\’s disease, few people noticed that the heart of the collaboration is at Intel Israel.
The collaboration depends on information gleaned from a new big-data analytics platform that detects, collects, transmits and analyzes patterns in mobility via wearable devices used by Parkinson’s patients.
Intel’s 100-person advanced analytics team is based at one of the corporation’s five Israeli sites. Department director Itay Yogev picked people from this team to design the infrastructure for the technology, which aims to vastly improve Parkinson’s research as well as the quality of life for participating patients.
Yogev explains that retired Intel CEO Andrew Grove, who has Parkinson’s disease, had the idea of putting together Intel expertise with Michael J. Fox Foundation support to push current research efforts far forward. Yogev’s staff started on the project in the summer of 2013.
The technology has since been tested for usability and accuracy at Harvard in Massachusetts, at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City and at Sourasky Medical Center in Tel Aviv under chief neurologist Prof. Nir Giladi, a renowned leader in the field of movement disorders. Preliminary results were encouraging enough to broaden the clinical trials to the Netherlands, says Yogev.
“The Netherlands has a national network of Parkinson’s patients, and we are working to connect with a few hundred of them during 2015.”
Parkinson’s is a neurodegenerative brain disease second only to Alzheimer\’s in worldwide prevalence. Yet nearly 200 years after the disease was first described, the way its effects and progression are measured hasn’t advanced. That information comes solely from doctor visits.