CuPiD · Closed-loop system for personalized and at-home rehabilitation of people with Parkinson's Disease

People with Parkinson's disease (PD) suffer from motor and cognitive impairments that severely impact mobility, fall risk, and multiple key aspects of functional independence. Until recently, treatment goals focused almost exclusively on symptom relief, but exciting recent work by CuPiD partners and others has demonstrated that motor learning and rehabilitation principles can be effective even in the presence of PD.It is critical to make these rehab-like therapies accessible to patients in their home-setting since they need continoues training, as PD is a cronic neurodegenerative disease. Optimal rehabilitation of a neurodegenerative disease like PD requires personalized training paradigms that patients can integrate into their everyday routine in their own homes and use for many years. Ongoing, long-term treatment in a clinical setting is not feasible, cost effective, or likely something that patients can comply with year after year.CuPiD is designed to meet this challenge. We will develop an ICT-enabled solution to the rehabilitation of patients with PD in their home setting, tailoring the solution to target mobility, cognitive function and debilitating PD symptoms such as freezing of gait. Key components of the CuPiD solution are: 1) a home-based rehabilitation system (based on unobtrusive wearable sensors, on-board intelligence for real-time biofeedback, virtual reality, and modular, multi-modal restitution interfaces); and 2) an intelligent telemedicine infrastructure for remote monitoring and supervision of the rehabilitation program by a clinician.The integrated, easy-to-use system will have a huge, beneficial impact on the therapeutic treatment of PD, empowering patients to improve their health-related quality of life in the comforts of their own home. At the same time, we envision that the ultimate costs of treatment will be reduced and the health-care burden dramatically lowered when the unique CuPiD system becomes available.