With AI-powered BTP, SAP Puts Parkinson's Patients in the Spotlight
For doctors and clinicians, understanding and interpreting rapidly fluctuating symptoms in patients with Parkinson’s Disease has presented a significant challenge to providing effective treatment.
Now, the combination of SAP’s flagship Business Technology Platform (BTP) and artificial intelligence (AI) forms the engine room of a new diagnosing tool developed by SAP in conjunction with DXC Technology, which promises to give healthcare professionals a more regular and reliable indication of their patients’ needs than ever before.
In a session at the 2023 SAP NOW ANZ Summit, SAP and DXC outlined the journey that was started by Dr Yun Hwang, a neurologist who requested assistance from SAP to improve diagnostic capability for the progressive neuro-degenerative disorder.
The root cause of Parkinson’s Disease is the brain’s gradual loss of ability to process dopamine. “Treatment is based on administration of dopamine,” Dr Yun told the Summit. “With sufficient dopamine, they’re ‘on’; if it’s insufficient, there’s inadequate symptom control and they’re ‘off’.
“Patients can fluctuate between on and off phases and require dopamine doses multiple times during the day. It’s always been difficult to diagnose if they’re on or off, as they can experience on-off at any time of the day.”
A simple but effective method to assess the severity of Parkinson’s symptoms – which include tremors and difficulty with speech, walking and swallowing – has been to ask the patient to draw a spiral on a piece of paper. Their ability to complete the task shows the degree of dopamine deficit at that moment. However, significant fluctuations over the course of the patient’s day make it difficult to prescribe treatment with accuracy.
Dr Yun worked with SAP Industry Business Architect Simon Grace to devise a monitoring system that enables patients to contribute to their own data collection and uses AI-driven analysis to give medical professionals a more complete picture of dopamine variations across the course of the day.
“All the patient needs to do is draw a spiral on a piece of paper and take a photo of it. The smarts in the AI will suggest to the doctor if there are symptoms present in that spiral,” Grace said in a video presentation to the Summit.”
“It's looking for things like how shaky is the line, are the lines crossing over one another? They'll also put in things like mood and blood pressure, their sleep, perhaps, and then also the medication if they took it, at what time.”
“This helps the doctor take a full picture of the day in the life of Parkinson's patients.”
The solution jointly developed by SAP and DXC Technology includes a core based in SAP’s BTP housing a machine learning algorithm (AI) developed in conjunction with a group of neurologists led by Dr Yun, plus user interfaces for patients and clinicians.
DXC Global SAP Offering Leader Coppelia Rose told the Summit that BTP was used as the platform for the application to be developed. “It actually provides (patients) the ability to upload their data on a regular basis, maybe twice a day, and then the clinician can actually see those results and see how their patients are tracking,” she said.
Other SAP tools and apps were also used to develop the application. “The patient interface is actually developed to run on a mobile device, and essentially the clinician can give the patient a QR code, they can scan that, and that allows them to register and onboard into the solution,” Rose said. “Dr Yun provided some design principles to the DXC development team to keep the patient interface quite simple.”
Dr Yun said a key strength of the tool is its ease of use. “The most important aspect for me was that it had to be something that was very easy to use for patients with Parkinson's disease and with a slightly older population,” he said.
“They're not always as comfortable with technology, and also because of their Parkinson's disease, their fine motor control is slightly impaired. So we really needed something simple and easy to use for patients.”
Data security was also a key requirement. “With health medical data, secure data collection and storage is important,” Dr Yun said. “But that's one thing I don’t really have to worry about in working with SAP and DXC. They have a lot of experience.”
The tool provides an important breakthrough for medical and clinical professionals. “This is the first step in bringing artificial intelligence into the clinic room and improve the way we manage Parkinson's disease,” Dr Yun said.
Grace agreed. “The benefit of a health sector that wields AI is faster decision making, improved accuracy within treatment, and a much more efficient healthcare system,” he said. “Imagine what we can do if we apply the same techniques to a lot of other different conditions around the world.”
The project’s success also demonstrates many other potential opportunities to utilise the combined strength of SAP’s BTP and AI’s developing capabilities.
Rose told the Summit that DXC is continuing to explore other opportunities to utilise the combination of BTP and AI. “We've got sustainability, where we can look at the reporting and reduction of carbon footprint, that's one of the AI use cases,” she said.
“There’s procurement around buying recommendations, human experience management with learning recommendations, and there are also use cases for AI in supply chain and finance, and sales and marketing as well."
“The DXC-SAP practice here (in Australia and New Zealand) has significant capability in the BTP space. And that not only includes artificial intelligence, but also the automation, the application development, integration and of course, analytics and data as well.”