Parkinson’s disease patients currently have their symptoms judged during brief, monthly hospital visits—a method that misses the hour-by-hour reality of their condition. TORUS aims to replace those snapshots with continuous, objective measurement inside the patient’s own home. The core problem is that clinical trials for new Parkinson’s drugs cannot reliably tell whether a treatment actually improves daily life. Without accurate measurement, promising therapies stall or fail. TORUS will equip patients with a wrist-worn sensor and AI-powered cameras that track mobility-related activities—walking, standing, turning—over weeks and months. A machine-learning pipeline fuses the data into precise metrics of symptom change. If successful, this platform could transform how pharmaceutical companies run trials, cutting the cost and uncertainty of drug development. For the 150,000 people with Parkinson’s in the UK—a number set to nearly double by 2040—better trials mean faster access to treatments that genuinely improve daily function. The NHS currently spends £375 million annually on Parkinson’s, with families and social services contributing another £877 million; more effective drugs could reduce those burdens.
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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 time TORUS 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.
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