Smartwatches may be able to buy potential Parkinson’s patients valuable time when it comes to diagnosis.
New research reveals that these devices can detect the degenerative condition years before the symptoms become serious, based solely on the movement and sleep patterns of those who wear them.
“Parkinson’s disease is primarily a movement disorder and we know that before a clinical diagnosis is made where all these motor symptoms have to be present, there’s a long phase where neuronal damage already occurs,” says Ann-Kathrin Schalkamp, a computational biologist at Cardiff University. “We know that if we want to treat it, we need to target people before all this early damage occurs.”
