Transforming the Objective Real-world measUrement of Symptoms (TORUS)

几十年来，帕金森氏症治愈的圣杯一直受到极端困难的阻碍，因为要衡量拟议中的新药是否真的改善了患者的症状和日常生活。Torus研究计划旨在通过一个用于患者自己家中的新型传感技术平台以及先进的数据融合和机器学习管道来解决这个问题，该管道可以测量几周和几个月内特定活动相关行为的变化。神经障碍是导致残疾的单一最大原因-仅在英国就有15万人患有帕金森氏症，这是增长最快的神经疾病。帕金森氏症是无法治愈的，随着时间的推移，症状会恶化，严重降低生活质量，给患者的家人带来沉重的负担。NHS每年的成本为3.75亿GB，家庭和社会服务又贡献了8.77亿GB(卫生和社会护理研究中心，2017年)。预计到2040年，英国帕金森氏症患者的人数将增加近一倍。为了将一种新药推向市场，制药公司需要通过临床试验来证明该药物是否可以改善行走时结冰、震颤等症状，以及承担日常任务的能力，如从坐着站立或在房间之间移动。目前，为了收集这些证据，试验中的每个患者都必须前往医院，由临床医生观察进行标准化测试。然而，这些(至多)每月的症状“快照”样本不能很好地反映患者真实症状的逐小时变化。因此，Torus的愿景是创建一种能力，在新药临床试验期间，在患者自己的家中，每天多次自主、连续和客观地测量疾病症状(与移动相关的日常生活活动)，并一次持续数月。TORUS将通过使用手腕可穿戴式集成人工智能相机来实现这一目标。来自可穿戴设备和摄像头的数据被融合，以给出与移动相关的活动质量的衡量标准。该方案以临床概念验证为结论。

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 TORUS research programme 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.Neurological disorders are the single largest cause of disability - in the UK alone there are 150,000 people with Parkinson's disease, the fastest-growing neurological condition. Parkinson's disease is incurable, and symptoms worsen over time, severely reducing quality of life and creating heavy burdens on the patient's family. The cost to the NHS each year is £375M, with families and social services contributing a further £877M (Centre for Health & Social Care Research, 2017). The number of people with Parkinson's disease in the UK is expected to nearly double by 2040.To get a new drug to market, pharmaceutical (pharma) companies need to evidence by a clinical trial whether the drug improves symptoms such as freezing when walking, tremor and the ability to undertake daily tasks such as standing up from sitting or moving between rooms. Currently, to gather this evidence, each patient in the trial must travel to hospital to be observed performing standardised tests by a clinician. However, these (at most) monthly "snapshot" samples of symptoms are a poor representation of the hour-by-hour variation of the patient's true symptoms. The vision of TORUS is therefore to create the capability to autonomously, continuously and objectively measure symptoms of illness (mobility-related activities of daily living) many times every day during the clinical trial of a new drug, in the patient's own home and for months at a timeTORUS will achieve this goal by using a wrist-worn wearable integrated synergistically with AI-enabled cameras. The data from the wearable and cameras is fused to give metrics of the quality of mobility-related activities. The programme concluses with a clinical proof of concept.