Longitudinal monitoring of Parkinson’s disease symptom progression using patient reported outcome measures, clinical assessments, and non-invasive sensors
PhD
In Dundee
Description
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Type
PhD
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Location
Dundee (Scotland)
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Duration
Flexible
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Start date
Different dates available
Accurate quantification of Parkinson’s Disease (PD) symptom severity is critical to assist neurologists optimize treatment and mitigate PD symptoms. In practice, clinical assessments are sparse (typically twice a year) under-representing the true time scale of PD fluctuations. Moreover, clinicians reach conclusions on the short period the patient physically visits the clinic, relying on their patients’ retrospective description of symptom severity. Ultimately, this may lead to a fragmented picture of daily aspects in understanding the extent of PD symptoms, which leads to suboptimal treatment, whilst these is no monitoring between intervening patient visits.
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Location
Start date
Start date
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This centre's achievements
All courses are up to date
The average rating is higher than 3.7
More than 50 reviews in the last 12 months
This centre has featured on Emagister for 14 years
Subjects
- Monitoring
- Perspective
- Measures
- Dimensionality
- PHD
- Clinical PhD
- Physical
- Physical computing
- Physical Chemistry
- Physical Education
- Physical Intervention
Course programme
The aim of this PhD project is to analyse longitudinal PROMs’ variability, and develop functional relationships between PROMs, clinical assessments (UPDRS), and sensor-based measurements. The student will explore links between actigraphy, speech, and sleep with clinical instruments (PROMs and UPDRS), with the ultimate goal of providing better longitudinal quantitative insights into PD symptom progression.
How is the project collaborative?
The supervisors bring a diverse set of skills and will be supporting the project from both a clinical perspective (Esther, Gordon), and also from a data analytics perspective (Thanasis). We plan to work collaboratively exchanging knowledge and expertise throughout the project from the data collection phase, to data analysis and interpretation of key findings. Thanasis will advise on the equipment and data collection methodology in close collaboration with Esther and Gordon who will engage with the local PD communities to collect data. Similarly, Esther and Gordon will be continuously updated on the data analysis progress, and will be assisting in posing key questions that are useful from a practitioner’s perspective, and also in interpreting findings. Physical visits to Dundee and Edinburgh by the supervisors and the recruited student will help ensure the student gets clinical input (Esther, Gordon) to develop a solid background in this domain and keep on coming with interesting new clinical questions, and also to master the analytical techniques required to analyse the data (Thanasis). We aim to keep this process iterative as we plan to use this project as a baseline for a longer-term fruitful collaboration.
We strongly believe that this interdisciplinary approach and the synergies it creates will create a unique environment to train a non-clinical PhD student, and also has the potential to lead to key breakthroughs and ultimately lead to better clinical outcomes which will benefit patients.
Longitudinal monitoring of Parkinson’s disease symptom progression using patient reported outcome measures, clinical assessments, and non-invasive sensors