Global initiative to use wearables to revolutionise disease detection

A global initiative involving UCL researchers will be using wearable technology such as wristbands and mobile apps to revolutionise the early detection of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's. The Early Detection of Neurodegenerative diseases (EDoN) initiative, led by Alzheimer's Research UK, will harness and analyse a wealth of digital data to develop signatures of disease - or "fingerprints" - that can be then detected using wearable technologies, such as smart watches. Diseases like Alzheimer's, the most common form of dementia, start to develop in the brain up to two decades before symptoms of dementia begin to show. Researchers worldwide now agree that future treatments and preventions will have the greatest benefit when given as early as possible in the disease. Leading organisations in data science, clinical and neurodegenerative research are joining forces to collect and analyse clinical and digital health data such as sleep, gait and speech patterns, to develop early digital fingerprints of diseases like Alzheimer's. "We hope that this ambitious global project will help bring us closer to finding much-needed treatments for neurodegenerative diseases, combining digital data measurements with gold standard clinical data such as imaging and memory tests, and using artificial intelligence to develop 'fingerprints' of individual diseases far earlier than is currently possible," said Dr Cath Mummery (UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology), co-lead of the project's Cohorts and Biomarkers Working Group.