10th WideHealth Seminar: Kyle Montague, “Democratising Healthcare Technologies: Wearables to cue for drooling in Parkinson’s Disease”

May 10th, 2022 – 16:30 CET
Registration link: https://bit.ly/3KI8S7P
Registration is free (zoom link shared before the session to those who register)

Date: May 10, 2022 16:30 CET (15:30 in Portugal)

Speaker: Kyle Montague

Title: Democratising Healthcare Technologies: Wearables to cue for drooling in Parkinson’s Disease

Abstract: Digital technologies are rapidly transforming the healthcare landscape. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are helping researchers to discover more and more about diseases – leading to new breakthroughs in treatments and cures. In recent years we seen a surge in the use of wearable technologies to track and monitor our physical activity and psychological measurements of daily life, giving healthcare professionals a greater understanding patient of symptoms and behaviours. With much of this innovation making its way into mainstream consumer devices, there is an opportunity for a new generation of self-management technologies that not only support interactions with healthcare professionals and researchers but enable individuals to take greater control of their health. The democratisation of healthcare technologies would not only allow an individual access to their health information, but it also seeks to provide the means by which they leverage that information to enrich and enhance their lives. Providing people living with Parkinson’s the know-how and resources to transform their ideas and desires into interventions and tools is key to enabling new breakthroughs. In this talk, I will discuss an ongoing project where we are designing and developing CueBand, a wearable device specifically for people living with Parkinson’s. CueBand is an open and customisable technology to support symptoms of Parkinson’s, such as cueing for decreased automatic swallowing, while also providing research grade data collection. Together with the Parkinson’s community we want to develop CueBand to create an entirely democratised infrastructure to transform the future of healthcare technologies.

Short bio: Kyle Montague is an Associate Professor in Computer and Information Sciences at Northumbria University, where he co-leads the Northumbria Social Computing (NorSC) research group. His research expertise is in Human-Computer Interaction and Digital Civics, with much of his work exploring novel applications and configurations of digital technologies to tackle societal challenges across a broad range of health and social care topics through both largescale approaches and small embedded participatory work with communities.

The EU-funded WideHealth project aims to conduct research on pervasive eHealth and establish a sustainable network of research and dissemination across Europe.

Web: https://widehealth.eu/ 
Twitter: https://twitter.com/EuWidehealth
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/widehealth-project-eu-105610207
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaPIT67HZEcHnU4IhdsCx_Q
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Bo9oEVTROTj9P1pl4ZrR5