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Companies and organizations from the fields of ICTs, computing, drug engineering and health have joined forces under the joint research project Home-based Empowered Living for Parkinson’s Disease (HELP), which is funded by the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) Joint Programme as part of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme. The UPC’s Technical Research Centre for Dependency Care and Autonomous Living (CETpD) is contributing to the project by designing a system for monitoring and improving the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, which affects more than four million people worldwide.

Joan Cabestany, director of the project at the UPC, explains that the aim is “to design a control system for a subcutaneous infusion pump that administers the exact drug dose required by patients according to their level of activity. We hope that this will prevent blockages and the adverse effects of medication overdoses”. The system, he continues, “will determine the dose required on the basis of the patient’s degree of mobility”.

The CETpD team has worked with the Fundació Hospital Comarcal Sant Antoni Abat de Vilanova i la Geltrú to design the movement sensor system for controlling the infusion pump, which is based on a combination of accelerometers and gyroscopes. The device itself is portable, non-invasive, and can be integrated into the patient’s normal clothing. Crucially, it provides immediate access to detailed information on general patient mobility and the degree of activity of the user in everyday life, without the need to connect external equipment.

The final results of the project, which is scheduled to finish in three years, will represent a major step forward in Parkinson’s disease control, enabling doctors to automatically regulate guidelines for individual treatment regimens. The project consortium is led by Telefónica I+D, with support from the University and University Hospital of Palermo, and corporate partners Telecom Italia, Saliwell Ltd and Maccabi Group Holdings Ltd (Israel), and HSG-IMIT and Mobile Solution Group (Germany).