The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given the green light to an Apple Watch app to monitor Parkinson’s disease developed by San Francisco-based startup Rune Labs. As reported by Reuters, the Apple Watch’s pre-existing sensors can already detect falls, tremors and other movement disorders consistent with Parkinson’s symptoms. But Rune Labs has taken things a step further with its app, collecting personalized data on the symptoms patients experience so that it can be shared with doctors to determine the best course of treatment.
Rune Labs CEO Brian Pepin said the data the Apple Watch collects through its Parkinson’s monitoring app will be combined with data from other sources, such as brain implants. He also said that the app uses Rune Labs’ StrivePD software to send a continuous stream of data to doctors to give more context to movement patterns. This provides doctors with more data than just seeing a patient coming in for a short clinical visit, as the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease change over time.
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“When you think of someone as their optimal therapy or combination of drugs or devices, or even whether or not a patient might be suitable for a certain clinical trial, it’s a A very difficult decision when you only have a little context, Pepin said.
Ever since Apple introduced its ResearchKit framework in 2015, developers have been testing the Apple Watch’s Parkinson’s disease monitor. Basically, this allowed the Apple Watch to track users’ walking gait, prompting them to walk 20 steps each way. Three years later, Apple updated ResearchKit with the Movement Disorders API, which can detect two common symptoms of Parkinson’s: tremors and dyskinesia, a side-effect of Parkinson’s drugs that cause fidgeting and twitching .
The Parkinson’s monitoring app is the second Apple Watch software to receive FDA approval after the agency approved AFib History for use in watchOS 9 following a WWDC presentation last week. This feature tells users diagnosed with atrial fibrillation how often their heart rhythms show symptoms of AFib, which, if left untreated, can lead to stroke and other cardiac complications.
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