With a flurry of startup activity, tech to monitor the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease is gaining traction in care.
On Thursday, Kneu Health, a startup spun out of Oxford University research labs, announced $5.6 million in funding for its smartphone app-based platform that measures movement, speech, and cognitive changes in people with Parkinson’s over time. In addition to working with the U.K. National Health Service, Kneu is being trialed by Cedars-Sinai, which is an investor, and Mass General Brigham. It has raised $11.2 million to date.
Over the summer, San Francisco-based Rune Labs quietly raised $11 million from its existing investors with plans to add more funding. The company has raised $57 million total to support its Parkinson’s technology, which uses an Apple Watch to track symptoms and boasts a growing partnership with Kaiser Permanente. Last week, wearable device and algorithm developer Empatica announced it had acquired PKG Health, another maker of Parkinson’s tracking tech that’s been used to care for 35,000 people. Empatica’s largest business is supporting pharma companies.
For more than a decade, there’s been a steady development of technology to monitor Parkinson’s, in part because the motor symptoms of the neurodegenerative disease, like tremors and gait changes, lend themselves especially well to tracking with sensors built into wearables and smartphones. Doctors also say they need these kinds of tools to monitor symptoms, which can vary considerably between people and from day to day. Right now, most people are only evaluated during in-person assessments using a subjective scale, and experts agree this snapshot is insufficient to understand someone’s experience. People with the disease are also asked to recall the ups and downs of their symptoms in relation to medication timing, often using paper diaries.
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