Kinesia Technology for Deep Brain Stimulation Programming-Medical / Health Care
Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a therapeutic approach that involves implanting electrodes in precise brain areas and fine-tuning the stimulation to alleviate symptoms such as in Parkinson’s disease. The variance in patient outcomes post-DBS is often linked to the optimization of DBS programming, which is inherently complex due to the multitude of adjustable parameters like contact points, polarity, frequency, pulse width, and amplitude. These numerous combinations must be evaluated swiftly during clinic visits, challenging the clinicians' ability to optimize treatment. Kinesia technologies assist by offering automated tools to measure tremor, bradykinesia, and dyskinesia, contributing to the programming process with visual tuning maps that depict symptom response to DBS settings. Furthermore, Kinesia's telemedicine solutions enable remote patient monitoring for some motor symptoms, offering clinicians data-driven insights into patient conditions both pre- and post-DBS surgery. Studies have shown these technologies can improve symptom management and reduce battery usage compared to standard programming approaches.
Details
Deep brain stimulation (DBS) involves implanting an electrode in a specific area of the brain, and then adjusting stimulation settings to a level that alleviates symptoms without causing side effects. While DBS has been shown effective for treating Parkinson’s, there can be disparity in outcomes among implanted patients due to varied postoperative management, particularly concerning DBS programming optimization. Variability may be due to programmer training and experience and time required to determine an optimal set of DBS parameters. Programmers can adjust several types of settings including the contact, polarity, frequency, pulse width, and amplitude of stimulation. This creates a tremendous amount of possible combinations that must be evaluated over multiple types of motor symptoms in a limited time frame during an office visit.
Programming deep brain stimulation (DBS) settings for Parkinson’s disease can be challenging for clinicians. Kinesia technology provides automated tools to measure tremor, bradykinesia, and dyskinesia, which can assist with programming DBS. Kinesia technology can provide tuning maps during in clinic programming sessions to help visualize symptom response to DBS settings. Kinesia telemedicine solutions allow clinicians to screen patients before DBS surgery and follow patient symptoms at home after programming.