Swallowing in Parkinson’s disease

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive neurological condition, affecting one person in every 500. About 120,000 people in the UK have Parkinson’s disease, most aged 50 or over. One of the actions affected by PD is swallowing. We swallow more than 500 times a day and usually clear our mouths subconsciously. In PD, the automatic swallow that clears saliva from the mouth fails to happen or works inefficiently, so too much saliva gathers. This can have a serious impact of the health and wellbeing of people with PD. SiDE is working with clinician Richard Walker and speech language therapist Nick Miller to develop digital devices to cue swallowing.

Our first version (pictured) was developed as a result of participatory design work with people with PD. In a preliminary pilot study we found that even an intermittent vibration on a wrist-worn device can be enough to cue users to swallow. Our current research is exploring the automatic recognition of swallowing (using a throat-worn microphone) and the use of this in combination with accelerometers to provide swallowing cues at the most appropriate time.