Portable neuroscience: using devices and apps for diagnosis and treatment of neurological disease

Scientists work in laboratories; comfortable spaces which we equip and configure to be ideal for our needs. The scientific paradigm has been adopted by clinicians, who run diagnostic tests and treatments in fully equipped hospital facilities. Yet advances in technology mean that that increasingly many functions of a laboratory can be compressed into miniature devices, or even into a smartphone app. This has the potential to be transformative for healthcare in developing nations, allowing complex tests and interventions to be made available in every village. In this talk, I will give two examples of this approach from my recent work. In the field of stroke rehabilitation, I will present basic research which we have conducted in animals over the last decade. This reveals new ways to intervene and strengthen surviving pathways, which can be deployed in cheap electronic devices to enhance functional recovery. In degenerative disease, we have used Bayesian statistical methods to improve an algorithm to measure how rapidly a subject can stop an action. We then implemented this on a portable device and on a smartphone app. The measurement obtained can act as a useful screen for Parkinson’s Disease. I conclude with an outlook for the future of this approach, and an invitation to those who would be interesting in collaborating in rolling it out to in African settings.