Kinesia is a gamified Parkinson’s disease tracker built for both patients and clinicians that makes symptom management and daily life easier for those living with Parkinson’s.
Studies show that popular tracking methods for Parkinson’s like home diaries are highly susceptible to a patient’s subjectivity, creating inaccuracies in data that disrupt medication efficacy, skew clinical decisions, and negatively impact patients’ well being. Even with modern tracking technologies, broader surveys show only 34% of patients actively tracked their symptoms over the year.
Instead of asking patients to describe their own symptoms, Kinesia allows their movements to speak for them. Patients play short gardening themed games that measure akinesia-like, bradykinesia-like, and dyskinesia-like symptoms. Patients tend to their garden through taking doses on time and completing mobile games, and are encouraged through daily streaks.
Each game is based on established clinical trials, adapted to work reliably at home. The plant watering game uses the finger tapping test, a reliable measure of bradykinesia. We also added a decrement that measures when taps slow and shrink over time. Firefly catching adapts a reaction time test, and we split each response into movement initiation and time to reach the target, telling a clinician whether a patient struggles to initiate a movement or execute it fully. In constellation tracing, the patient swipes along a constellation instead of typing or spiral tracing, which are too noisy or difficult on a small screen. Together, these choices allow the data that reaches the clinician to reflect the patient’s movement.
While some clinicians note that apps generate data without clear relevance or meaning, Kinesia visualizes data based on frequent use in clinical settings. Each task’s graphs show when the test was taken, test performance in relation to dosage, a primary statistic that reflects performance, and detailed statistics to elucidate patients’ movement symptoms. For example, tapping graphs not only display overall speed on the primary graph, but also rhythm, decrement, accuracy, and drift on the detailed graph, which can explain the cause of a symptom.
The cost of unreliable tracking in Parkinson’s is often hidden—a decision that wasn’t made, or information that was lost to memory. But with an incurable disease that demands lifetime management, each choice shapes a patient’s daily life. It decides whether or not they can play sports with a loved one, speak uninterrupted, and move with freedom. With Kinesia, patients and their caretakers can have better and easier care.
Want to see the app demo? Here’s the youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmDAg-RShnE&t=9s
- 4 devlogs
- 8h
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