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

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 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, which has unmatched expertise researching, designing and deploying multi-sensor systems in family homes, and Newcastle’s Mobilise-D IMI project, a multinational collaboration between big pharma and academia.