Digital Health Takes Center Stage at the MDS Conference

This year’s International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society (MDS) was held over the last weekend of September in Philadelphia. The theme, “Movement Disorders in the Digital Age: Harnessing AI for Better Lives” was a focal point throughout the event, shaping the plenary sessions, breakout discussions, and poster presentations. The Keynote Lecture and over 40 posters focused on digital health technologies and their use in movement disorders. A few key ideas stood out, underscoring the game-changing potential of digital tools to reshape clinical trials, improve patient care for those with movement disorders, and complement biological staging with deep phenotyping.

The ability of digital tools to reduce the sample size needed in clinical trials and improve our understanding of the lived experience of patients was a central theme across multiple presentations. Including our own poster, “Reliability of Digital Measures in Parkinson’s Disease and Their Implications for Sample Size Calculations”, which presented data on more than 30 digital measures of motor function in Parkinson’s patients (currently in press in Frontiers in Digital Health).  The power of digital health solutions to capture more granular and frequent measures that reflect daily life offers more reliable insights into disease progression. Similar results were mentioned by the keynote speaker and were present in other posters and presentations. 

As digital health technologies become more widely used in both clinical care and drug development, community driven standards are starting to appear. This is apparent in a common set of smartphone-based active measurements used across multiple studies and through active collaborative work. For example, the session “From Newton to AI: Science of Postural Control and Gait” highlighted the work of Mobilise-D, which is setting best practices and open-access algorithms for gait assessment that are gaining  broad adoption.

Finally, digital measures offer an exciting opportunity to complement biological staging with detailed phenotypic profiling. Saturday’s plenary session on the Neurobiology of Parkinson’s Disease focused on the importance of bringing together multiple biomarkers–alpha-synuclein, Tau protein, DAT-SPECT imaging and genetics–to generate detailed, individualized pictures of Parkinson’s Disease.  Incorporating digital measures in upcoming studies of these biologically-defined subtypes of Parkinson’s will pave the way for more personalized and precise interventions in neurodegenerative diseases.