Using Computer Vision Tools To Analyse Human Motion to Study and Manage Parkinson's Disease

The project explores how to build computer vision tools to analyse motion disorder symptoms, in the context of studying and managing Parkinson's Disease (PD). Parkinson's' disease is progressive neurodegenerative disease, with an increasing global prevalence. Mobility dysfunctions, like gait or turning abnormalities, are the main symptoms of Parkinson's disease and they also tightly connect with the quality of life. Currently, the gold-standard of clinical diagnosis and evaluation for PD requires face-to-face assessment in the clinic. People living with PD, when being observed by a clinician in the hospital in the short time window, behaves differently from a home-setting and therefore the assessment is not able to fully evaluate the everyday motor disorders. Therefore, a frequent and objective measurement of PD will benefit both the study and management of Parkinson's disease. The novelty of the project is applying state-of-the-art deep learning computer vision models to analyse special, valuable, expert-annotated dataset on people with PD, like the dataset collected using Sphere technology. In a domestic-setting, potentially more in-depth, more personalized information is collected, and with the advancement in computer vision technology, more insightful knowledge could be learned from these data. Specifically, the project involves training effective machine learning and deep learning models to estimate human pose in the customized videos datasets, and to perform downstream analysis on disease progression, and to deriving other statistical insights. Clinicians' expert analysis could be used as ground truth annotations to train the model to perform quantitive and qualitative analysis as well.

Impact on Health and Care
The CDT primarily addresses the most pressing needs of nations such as the UK - namely the growth of expenditure on long term health conditions. These conditions (e.g. diabetes, depression, arthritis) cost the NHS over £70Bn a year (~70% of its budget). As our populations continue to age these illnesses threaten the nation's health and its finances.

Digital technologies transforming our world - from transport to relationships, from entertainment to finance - and there is consensus that digital solutions will have a huge role to play in health and care. Through the CDT's emphasis on multidisciplinarity, teamwork, design and responsible innovation, it will produce future leaders positioned to seize that opportunity.

Impact on the Economy
The UK has Europe's 2nd largest medical technology industry and a hugely strong track record in health, technology and societal research. It is very well-placed to develop digital health and care solutions that meet the needs of society through the creation of new businesses.

Achieving economic impact is more than a matter of technology. The CDT has therefore been designed to ensure that its graduates are team players with deep understanding of health and social care systems, good design and the social context within which a new technology is introduced.

Many multinationals have been keen to engage the CDT (e.g. Microsoft, AstraZeneca, Lilly, Biogen, Arm, Huawei ) and part of the Director's role will be to position the UK as a destination for inwards investment in Digital Health. CDT partners collectively employ nearly 1,000,000 people worldwide and are easily in a position to create thousands of jobs in the UK.

The connection to CDT research will strongly benefit UK enterprises such as System C and Babylon, along with smaller companies such as Ayuda Heuristics and Evolyst.

Impact on the Public
When new technologies are proposed to collect and analyse highly personal health data, and are potentially involved in life or death decisions, it is vital that the public are given a voice. The team's experience is that listening to the public makes research better, however involving a full spectrum of the community in research also has benefits to those communities; it can be empowering, it can support the personal development of individuals within communities who may have little awareness of higher education and it can catalyse community groups to come together around key health and care issues.

Policy Makers
From the team's conversations with the senior leadership of the NHS, local leaders of health and social care transformation (see letters from NHS and Bristol City Council) and national reports, it is very apparent that digital solutions are seen as vital to the delivery of health and care. The research of the CDT can inform policy makers about the likely impact of new technology on future services.

Partner organisation Care & Repair will disseminate research findings around independent living and have a track record of translating academic research into changes in practice and policy.

Carers UK represent the role of informal carers, such as family members, in health and social care. They have a strong voice in policy development in the UK and are well-placed to disseminate the CDTs research to policy makers.

STEM Education
It has been shown that outreach for school age children around STEM topics can improve engagement in STEM topics at school. However female entry into STEM at University level remains dramatically lower than males; the reverse being true for health and life sciences. The CDT outreach leverages this fact to focus STEM outreach activities on digital health and care, which can encourage young women into computer science and impact on the next generation of women in higher education.

For academic impact see "Academic Beneficiaries" section.