The holy grail of a cure for Parkinson’s disease has been held back for decades by the extreme difficulty of measuring whether proposed new drugs actually improve the patient’s symptoms and daily life. The EPSRC-funded TORUS research programme (£6.17M,EP/X036146/1) aims to solve that problem through a novel platform of sensing technologies for use in patients’ own homes along with an advanced data fusion and machine learning pipeline that measures changes in specific mobility-related behaviours over weeks and months.  

This is a challenge beyond any single discipline. It requires expertise in engineering, design, computer science, privacy and ethics, and clinicians with a nuanced understanding of Parkinson’s disease. Indeed, this challenge goes beyond academia – it needs co-design with patients and their families. 

This proposal brings together, for the first time, the Digital Health team from Bristol with Newcastle’s Translational and Clinical Research Institute, Open Lab, and National Innovation Centre for Data (NICD). It leverages both the experience of Bristol’s EPSRC-funded SPHERE IRC (total grant £16M, 2013-2022), which has unmatched expertise researching, designing and deploying multi-sensor systems in family homes, and Newcastle’s £50M Mobilise-D IMI project, a multinational collaboration between big pharma and academia. The two teams have a track record of delivery, critical mass and the complementary skillsets needed to address this research challenge. 

Find out more about TORUS here.