Question: when you have worked out how brain diseases affect someones ability to walk and balance what will you do?

James Clarke answered on 15 Nov 2016:

That’s a brilliant question! That might be the best one so far.

There are two real answers to this question:

1. If we understand how the disease affects the ability to walk and balance, then we can can turn that relationship around. That means we can take data about how you’re walking and balancing, then use that to measure how bad a brain disease is. Now doctors are able to do this, but they only get to see patients every couple of weeks. With wearable sensors, we can be getting that score all the time. Some days the patient may be feeling better, and other days worse. The drugs which are used to treat these diseases can have quite strong side affects, so if a patient is having a good day, then with our data we could tell them to take a smaller dose and save them from suffering from the side affects.

2. The second thing we can do is perhaps predict things in advance using data from wearable sensors. If we start to see patterns in the behaviour of certain groups of people, then we may be able to anticipate when they’re about to fall over. This information could be used to send a notification to their phone warning them, or even deploy a wearable set of airbags on their hips to protect them from being broken.