The Apple Watch will soon be an indispensable device for patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease. This follows clearance by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of StrivePD, a software that tracks Parkinson’s disease symptoms via the Apple Watch.
StrivePD will enable passive tracking, meaning patients will no longer need to manually track symptoms between visits. Read on to find out how.
The FDA Approves an Apple Watch Parkinson’s Disease Tracker
The FDA has cleared StrivePD—a software that helps people with Parkinson’s disease track their symptoms—created by the neurological company Rune Labs. The clearance paves the way for the availability and use of StrivePD by more patients suffering the neurological disorder.
“With this clearance, the Rune Labs’ StrivePD app enables precision clinical care and trial participation for tens of thousands of Parkinson’s patients who already use these devices in their daily lives,” Rune Labs said in a statement. StrivePD works on the Apple Watch.
StrivePD makes it easy for patients to track and log their symptoms without hassle thanks to passive measurements made by the Apple Watch. Due to this data-driven approach, StrivePD helps provide more valuable data, especially when it comes to Parkinson’s medication, where how much to take and when to take it is just as important.
What Is StrivePD and How Does It Work?
StrivePD is Rune Labs’ care delivery ecosystem, specializing in Parkinson’s disease. According to the company, the StrivePD ecosystem allows patients to share their daily symptoms with clinicians to help better understand an individual’s condition for personalized Parkinson’s care.
The software is built on top of Apple’s Movement Disorder API, unveiled in 2018 to enable third-party developers to passively monitor Parkinson’s disease symptoms like tremors and dyskinesia.
StrivePD makes the whole process autonomous, leading to more accurate data and hence better understanding that, ultimately, should help improve Parkinson’s treatment. This adds up to the many ways the Apple Watch can make your life simpler. Of course, there are other Apple Watch health and fitness features that you may find essential as well.
Data-Driven Approaches to Care Management and Clinical Trials Are Indispensable
Data-driven research is critical for the advancement of the medical field. As such, collecting Parkinson’s disease data from thousands of patients will have two positive effects:
- It will lead to a better understanding of the disease and hence better treatment per-patient basis.
- It will provide comprehensive data for more research and better trials.
“As we have seen in oncology, the introduction of large quantities of real-world data has the power to transform drug development and fundamentally change disease prognosis. This clearance is a major step towards building a similar paradigm in neurology,” said Brian Pepin, CEO and Founder of Rune Labs.
Pepin adds that the collected data will help the company’s pharmaceutical and MedTech partners “run more efficient trials with higher quality outcome data, thereby enabling more therapies to come to market quickly to help those suffering from Parkinson’s.”
Get More Value From Your Apple Watch
Despite being considered expensive by many, the Apple Watch is continually becoming a must-have wearable. It packs many health and fitness tracking abilities, from simple heart rate monitoring to ECG measurements and blood oxygen levels. You should always enable such features if you have an Apple Watch to ensure you’re getting the most of your device.
