Augmented Reality in Parkinson’s Disease Therapy

A pioneering dance class at Brooklyn as reported by JAMA is breaking stereotypes with a collaboration between the acclaimed Mark Morris Dance Group and the Brooklyn Parkinson Group, a Parkinson’s Disease support group. As some of you may know, Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is a long-term neurological degenerative disorder that affects the motor system. Dance lessons have been used in the past as therapy for PD patients, but transportation, availability and demand sometimes makes offering this solution to everyone a bit difficult . . . but that’s about to change, and soon we hope!

Dancing has been tested for some time now for PD patients, as you can learn here, a 2015 meta-analysis in the Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, the beneficial effects for patients with PD who attended 2 one-hour dance classes every week for 10 to 13 weeks were proven.  Also, a pilot study done with the Dance for PD foundation published in November 2016 in Contemporary Clinical Trials suggested improvement across 12 measures of motor function, cognitive function, emotion and quality of life.

SS+K, a creative agency based in Manhattan, New York, commissioned by Dance for PD, developed an app for Google Glass, called Moving Through Glass.  The app is based on superimposing short instructional videos over the wearer’s natural environment. With training models like warm up or balance me, PD patients can transport their physical therapy to any environment they’d like. Patients with a more advanced stage of the disease or with transportation problems can have their dance sessions on-demand.  Awesome!  And do you think this isn’t going to improve patient’s lives? – If so, you would be terribly wrong, this app can dramatically change PD patient’s lives for the better! Click here or here to see a short video about Moving Through Glass.

Moving Through Glass is developed for Google Glass, and sadly, as we know, the consumer version of the Google Glass is not yet available (and we don’t know when it will be), but SS+K and Dance for PD are continuing to develop this beautiful app, so I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of Dance for PD and Moving Through Glass. If you would like to help in building the future of this app or would like to learn more about movingthroughglass.org, click here.

We can only imagine the potential benefits of apps like Moving Through Glass hitting the mass market, not only for PD but for several other disorders in need of physical therapy to improve the user’s quality of life.  The more we explore around the world searching for the potential impact of Augmented Reality on the medical field, the more we are rendered beyond speechless about its possibilities.  The future is happening now!

Sources: Journal of American Medicine Association (JAMA), Mark Morris Dance Group, Dance for PD, SS+K, Contemporary Clinical Trials, Archives of Clinical Medicine and Rehabilitation, movingthroughglass.org