Parkinson’s KinetiGraph by Global Kinetics Corporation

Parkinson’s disease can be difficult to monitor by clinicians. Depending on the type of Parkinson’s a patient has, the drug dosage and treatment can vary. Therefore it can be difficult for a clinician to understand the way medication is reacting with a patients body when they return home.

Global Kinetics created a watch to monitor patients movement, revealing reliable data to help adjust medication. However in order to retrieve the data from the watch, patients had to send the device via post. This proved difficult, especially for patients in rural areas.

Global Kinetics approached our engineers here at Procept to help them create an IoT integrated aspect. A “smart dock” where patients could charge their watch and send the data inside the watch to their doctor via the cloud.

COMPLETE SOLUTION

DESIGN. DEVELOPMENT. ENGINEERING.

CHALLENGE

Our challenge was to replace the existing cable, with a smart dock that not only extracts data and posts it to the cloud but also serves as a charging dock.

The dock needed to be compliant to medical device standards, this in turn had an impact on the docks design, it also needed to ensure it could connect and send data from any distance (ensuring rural patients could utilise the dock in the same way).

It was also important for the device to be designed for home clinical settings.

SOLUTION

Engineering Services:
We created a multi-functioning smart dock which enabled patients to charge their watch as well as send data to their clinicians. The device integrated both 3G and 4G data, handling aspects of regulatory compliance to power consumption and regional variation

Manufacturing Services:
Together we worked with a contract manufacturer and industrial designers D+I to create a device that was suitable for clinical and home use.
Manufacturing services included, smooth manufacture transfer, manufacturing validation, identification and mitigation of any risks and potential point of failure with manufacturing process as well as ongoing manufacturing support for volume manufacture.

KEY AREAS

Class II Medical Device
Medical Wearable device
ISO 13485 & IEC 62304 standards management
Embedded mobile data
Mobile data interface
Cost optimization – optimizing manufactured cost

PROJECT SUCCESS

OUTCOME

The Parkinson’s KinetiGraph provides continuous, objective, ambulatory assessment of the treatable and disabling symptoms of Parkinson’s disease including tremor, bradykinesia and dyskinesia. The PKG™ also provides an assessment of daytime somnolence and an indication of propensity for impulsive behaviours.

The Parkinson’s wearable technology has been used by nearly 30K patients to date. Reports show that the Smart watch has improved management of Parkinson’s, with 3+ million recording hours provided across the world.

As featured in the Australian Financial Review.