Virtual reality system to measure visuomotor dysfunction in Parkinson’s disease
Palak Gupta (Department of Biomedical Engineering)
Freedman Student Fellow 2021–2022
Palak Gupta is a doctoral candidate in the department of Biomedical Engineering. Her grant research will explore applications of virtual reality (VR) in diagnosing visual dysfunction in neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, and incorporating this quantification in deep brain stimulation (DBS) treatment planning.
Visuomotor abnormalities in PD are extremely common affecting up to a third of these patients, but they are ignored. This is in part due to the lack of infrastructure required to diagnose and quantify such impairments. Palak proposes to design a virtual reality (VR) based interface to objectively examine the eye movement abnormality in PD, and deploy this setup as an all-in-one, portable and accurate tool that is accessible to most Neurology clinics that routinely care for PD patients.
