Public Funding for Gaitq Limited

Parkinson's disease is the fastest growing progressive neurological disorder, affecting over 10 million people worldwide. Symptoms like rigidity, tremor, freeze of gait, and loss of balance significantly impact patients' daily life, leading to early retirement, reduced activity, and a high risk of falling and associated injuries. Monitoring the health status and disease progression of people with Parkinson's (PwP) is essential for providing the best treatment to them. This may be via identifying changes to their condition and adjusting medication regimes or prescribing physiotherapy and assistance early to prevent possible falls. However, due to limited healthcare resources, most PwP can only have a clinical consultation every 12 to 18 months. As a consequence, PwP's conditions may have deteriorated in-between clinical visits, causing substantial changes to their daily life. Long waiting lists for essential treatments, like specialised physiotherapy, further compound the issue. Therefore, more frequent monitoring and assessment of PwP's conditions is necessary to proactively adapt to their treatment needs as the disease progresses. gaitQ has developed a vibrational cueing device which is used by patients in their daily lives to assist their walking. gaitQ's early adopters have shown good compliance of wearing the devices in their everyday environment, thus allowing us to continuously collect movement data that can be used to provide more accurate longitudinal data to inform the patient's health status and disease progression. Throughout this project, gaitQ will investigate the use of movement and ophthalmic sensors to accurately measure the condition of PwP. 100 participants in the UK and Switzerland will be evaluated in a controlled clinical/home setting, enabling the validation of these tools as an efficient way to measure patients' health status. Success of this project will enable PwP to receive much faster and better care. It will be more efficient and cheaper to monitor if PwP's condition, to refer patients to the most appropriate care services and to determine if the current medication is working well. It will also alleviate the burden on neuroconsultants and Parkinson's nurses, empowering them to remotely monitor their patients' disease development and to rapidly identify patients in need of urgent care and interventions. The collaboration with the Swiss partner (MachineMD) will not only allow us to collect more data sets for the algorithm development with variety in demographics, enhancing IP and product scopes, but also help us build network and raise business profile in the EU, supporting market expansion for gaitQ's products.