Study Rationale: We’ve spent several years exploring the potential of supporting human movement with wearable robotics and we believe it has tremendous potential for the Parkinson’s community. With some early prototypes, we have helped a small number of individuals living with Parkinson’s walk more confidently, take longer, crisper steps and experience less freezing. But for someone to want to wear a device like ours every day, it needs to also be light, comfortable, stylish and easy to use. Our goal is to build a device that is equal parts helpful in assisting gait and delightful to wear!
Hypothesis: We hypothesize that we can reduce freezing, improve balance and improve gait mechanics for people living with Parkinson’s with a lightweight (<1.5 kg) powered hip device that is easy to use, comfortable and able to be manufactured at scale.
Study Design: We have several sub-projects. One is Skip working with a few individuals to refine the hardware and project usability. Another is working with UCSF and Georgia Tech to collect high quality data to help us address freezing of gait and balance. Finally we will then evaluate our impact by measuring whether our devices help 30 people living with Parkinson’s to walk better and more confidently, several people will take the product home for a month to see how it impacts their everyday lives.
Impact on Diagnosis/Treatment of Parkinson’s disease: Movement challenges are one of the primary challenges of Parkinson’s as the disease progresses. We hope that a device like ours will help people with Parkinson’s stay physically active and connected to the world around them with minimal side effects - adapting and assisting their changing gait challenges over time.
Next Steps for Development: If successful, our next step will be to start the process of making our product available to people. This includes finalising the design to include any feedback from this study, starting to set up a manufacturing process, applying for FDA approval and working with clinicians to get the product to the people who will use it most.