Validating DIGItal biomarkers for better personalized treatment of Parkinson’s Disease – DIGIPD

Digital biomarkers (DMs) from sensors and devices have the potential to change fundamentally our understanding of Parkinson’s Disease (PD), because they allow for a quantitative and continuous monitoring of disease symptoms, also outside clinics (telemedicine). This includes the possibility to monitor the response to treatment, hence opening the opportunity to adapt medication pathways quickly, if necessary. The aim of this proposal is to evaluate, in how far DMs extracted from a mobile gait sensor system as well as recordings of voice (also via telephone) and face movement (via video) could help for accurate disease diagnosis and treatment dependent prognosis for each individual patient. This could help to take better-informed medical decisions for each patient at the right time.
Our project brings together renowned medical and computational experts in the PD field. Starting from pre-existing data and advanced AI methods developed by project partners in the past, we will assess different types of DMs regarding their ability to discriminate between PD and healthy controls, for predicting different types of PD disease trajectories and for predicting the treatment dependent change of disease symptoms over time. Moreover, we will investigate via statistical and AI methods the relation of different types of DMs to each other, to clinical outcome scores and to molecular disease mechanisms, hence opening the opportunity to a so far unseen level of interpretation of DMs. Finally, we will provide important insights into feasible legal pathways for the future use of AI and DMs in clinical routine (specifically with respect to data privacy aspects). Moreover, we will investigate the acceptance, ethical concerns and perceived value of such approaches by patients.
Altogether, we believe that our project could help to define the technical, legal, ethical and social basis for the future use of DMs within Personalized Medicine based PD treatment.