Luigi Battista won a competition dedicated to business ideas
27 April 2016 - Twenty-nine years old, from Potenza, graduated in Biomedical Engineering in 2009 at theUniversità Campus Bio-Medico di Roma and today a consultant in clinical engineering at some hospital facilities in Puglia and Basilicata. He is Luigi Battista came up with the idea of the Pd-Watch, a medical device capable of measuring tremor in patients with Parkinson's disease or in subjects at risk.
explains Eng. Battista: “I never often have to cultivate a passion for research, which leads me to look for innovative solutions to improve people's lives. Working in a clinical setting, I have asked myself several times if it was possible to monitor Parkinson's disease without limiting it to just the moment of the neurological examination, given that the severity of the tremor, one of the main symptoms of this pathology, can vary significantly over the course of the all day. Hence the idea: a light and non-invasive device, easy to wear and simple to use”.
In the special watch, a small box measuring four by five centimeters and less than two high, there is an electronic card that measures the intensity of the tremor, a microcontroller and a storage device that collects the data. Through an Internet connection or a memory card, the information is captured by the doctor and transferred to an online platform. A calculator processes the results in the form of graphs which allow the doctor to monitor the time course of the disease and to quantify the therapeutic effects of the treatment plan.
An undoubtedly innovative research project, which has turned into a real business project through the participation of the former student UCBM at Think4South, a competition dedicated to southern business ideas on risk prevention and management. "I involved two of my childhood friends in the project, Gianvito Summa and Pierpaolo Zampino, respectively graduates in Computer Science and Economics. - explains the former student UCBM - We arrived among the eight finalist projects out of 400 presented and finally we reached second place, winning 15 thousand euros. It was then that I realized that the Pd-Watch would no longer be a pastime, but a product to be launched on the market". The project was also subsequently presented at the Sanit@ Digitale Forum, and is now just waiting to be patented.
