Emerald co-founders describe in-home gait sensor to assess Parkinson’s severity and more

Massachusetts Institute of Technology and  University of Rochester researchers including Emerald Innovations Inc. co-founders Dina Katabi and Rumen Hristov described in Science Translational Medicine a method to assess Parkinson’s disease severity, progression and medication response using a device that measures gait via radio waves. The authors collected data from 50 participants for up to one year, resulting in 200,000 gait speed measurements, and showed at-home gait speed strongly correlated with gold-standard Parkinson’s assessments.

Katabi’s group recently revealed another in-home environmental sensor to detect Parkinson’s and track its progression using breathing signals from radio waves that bounce off a person’s body during sleep. Combining the sleep and gait metrics from in-home passive monitors could offer a fuller picture of disease progression and therapeutic effects with minimal burden to patients...