Even when brain surgery is the best option, it's not exactly a good one. For years, doctors have been slicing open the skulls of Parkinson's patients to implant electrical stimulation devices in their brains because this treatment, known as deep brain stimulation, is unfortunately the best shot they have at regaining some level of normalcy in their lives.
After observing the lengthy and invasive surgical procedure required to implant the pacemaker-like electrical devices necessary for deep brain stimulation, a group of biomedical engineering graduate students set out to provide Parkinson's patients with a better option. Their prototype for a hi-tech headband, called STIMband, that delivers electrical stimulation to the brain noninvasively, won the second-place prize in VentureWell's BMEidea national design contest on June 9, the latest of several prestigious awards the work has earned.
"Our group is working on the idea of using noninvasive brain stimulation for Parkinson's disease symptom control as a new clinical treatment," said Yousef Salimpour, a research associate at Johns Hopkins University who oversaw the work, in a statement. "Our preliminary results were promising. Patients keep asking us for more of this treatment. But we couldn't provide the treatment for them because there is no portable and FDA-approved device like this for Parkinson's patients that is on the market at this time."
When the students approached Salimpour's group with their idea for a noninvasive brain stimulation device, the headband seemed like a great way to address Parkinson's patients' requests.
"We told him we had an idea for a portable home version of this equipment," Shruthi Rajan, a student team member, said in a statement. "But we planned to add safety measures to make sure the patient used it properly without a doctor or nurse being present."
STIMband's easy-to-use design features a large button that's easy for even shaky Parkinson's-afflicted hands to press. The device delivers a preprogrammed amount of stimulation per day at the intensity prescribed by the patent's doctor.
So far, STIMband is still in the prototype phase and has not yet been tested on humans. However, Salimpour hopes that Parkinson's patients will be able to try the new devices out in their own homes "very soon."
Parkinson's disease isn't fatal, but it is incurable and can be extremely intrusive. The tremor, muscle stiffness and other movement impairments that come along with the disease can turn even mundane tasks like typing on a keyboard or brushing one's teeth into a challenge. Also, as Parkinson's progresses, it can eventually leave its victims incapacitated.
These symptoms occur because the neurons in a Parkinson's brain fire in abnormal patterns. Electrical stimulation can correct these abnormal firing patterns, but so far, the only approved devices for this purpose must be implanted deep within the brain. If the alternative option is to be left incapacitated, brain surgery becomes an appealing option. If the treatment could be performed noninvasively, however, it wouldn't have to be a last resort.
STIMband will have to undergo rigorous testing before it can benefit Parkinson's patients. However, the process of creating the device has already benefited the students.
"In our usual college classes, we're just given a textbook problem to solve," student team member Ian Graham said in a statement. "In this program, being able to find a real-life biomedical problem and figure out how to address it was huge. And we even received letters of encouragement from some of the patients we met."
