Brianna Hood from Rune Labs (StrivePD)

An interview with Brianna Hood from Rune Labs (StrivePD) on July 25, 2023 by George Ackerman, Ph.D, J.D.

Biography

Brianna Hood began her Physical Therapy training at the University of Delaware, where she completed her Bachelor in Science in Exercise Science and Kinesiology. She continued to pursue her Doctorate in Physical Therapy (DPT) at Rutgers University. There her passion for neurologic conditions grew, specifically her love for working with those diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Brianna has clinical experience treating Parkinson’s in a variety of settings including acute rehab, home health, skilled nursing facilities, and outpatient clinics. She is both LSVT-BIG certified and a Rock Steady Boxing Coach. She joined Rune Labs in 2022 as a member of the Patient Specialist team. Day-to-day, she works closely with patients, onboarding them onto the StrivePD platform, providing support, and creating educational resources for users. She also uses her clinical knowledge to assist with updates to the StrivePD product, specifically around mobility metrics and exercise activity logging. She is excited to contribute to data-driven efforts of improving patient care and supporting the next generation of Parkinson’s care.

Please tell me a little about your background and what got you involved with awareness.

I began Physical Therapy training at the University of Delaware, where I completed my Bachelor in Science in Exercise Science and Kinesiology. I continued to pursue my Doctorate in Physical Therapy (DPT) at Rutgers University. I’ve always been interested in neuro and the brain since I was little. Parkinson’s was introduced to me early in my life, with my grandfather who was diagnosed with PD. Then while in PT school, we had a guest lecturer, a physical therapist from the Dan Aaron’s Parkinson’s center at the University of Pennsylvania. I reached out to shadow her and she also gave me several book recommendations, specifically “Brain Storms” by Jon Palfreman. I was able to witness firsthand the incredible improvements in mobility and symptoms that can occur with physical therapy in the Parkinson’s population, and I was hooked. I’ve treated the Parkinson’s population in a variety of settings including home health, acute rehab hospital, skilled nursing facilities, and outpatient clinics. In 2022, I discovered Rune Labs and was very excited hearing about their mission and work with the PD population. I knew that I wanted to be a part of it and bring in my clinical knowledge of the benefits of physical activity for PD.

Can you tell me more about the foundation?

Rune Labs is a software and data analytics company for precision neurology, supporting care delivery and therapy development. StrivePD is our disease management care tool that enables people with Parkinson’s to track their symptoms and medication in advance of clinical visits, and allows them to share their daily Parkinson’s experience with their neurologist or movement disorder specialist. The platform curates individuals’ information, including tremor and dyskinesia from the Apple Watch, Apple Watch Health Kit data, self-reported data, brain imaging, genetic history, and brain signals from a deep brain stimulation implant. Similar to a continuous blood glucose monitor for diabetes, StrivePD is continuously monitoring motor symptoms and collecting data from people with Parkinson’s (PwPD). With the data being collected from StrivePD, PwPD and their neurologists can finally detect rising problems early and at the right moment, all while providing personalized treatment options. In June 2022, StrivePD was granted 510(k) clearance by FDA to passively monitor Parkinson’s symptoms including tremor and dyskinesia through measurements made by Apple Watch. Using StrivePD, users can automatically record their symptoms via the Apple Watch and StrivePD app, learn from patterns in behaviors to manage their conditions, improve communication with their care teams and enable care teams to view your symptoms and brain data all in one place. StrivePD is a care companion powered by personalized insights.

Challenge/Solution: We are using data to improve care for people with Parkinson’s today so that a disease-modifying treatment can be developed in the future. Clinicians have struggled for years to properly treat Parkinson’s because the disease is incredibly complex with a wide range of symptoms that vary not only person-to-person but also on a day-by-day basis for each individual. Plus, there’s no easy way to measure how a person with Parkinson’s is doing; clinicians have to rely on patients to self-report their symptoms and on and off periods, which can be hard to remember and difficult to distinguish from medication side effects. StrivePD collects a continuous stream of objective, quantifiable data from Parkinson’s patients, which is displayed in real-time to the people with Parkinson’s using the app but also their clinicians through a web portal. The clinician portal presents summaries of symptoms from the Apple Watch, medication use, sleep data + other Apple health kit data, brain signal from DBS, and notes (all timestamped). The StrivePD dashboard enhances the patient-clinician dialogue. With this data, the clinician can make better informed decisions for their patients’ treatments, seeing the whole movie of the disease progression outside the clinic. As of July 2023, Rune Labs’ StrivePD is used at over 150 clinical sites and over 260 clinicians.

What is your passion and how did you get involved in Parkinson’s awareness and hope for a cure?

I have a deep passion for bringing awareness to the benefits of exercise and physical activity to the PD community. We now know that exercise can be disease modifying and some studies have shown that exercise can actually slow the progression of the disease. Exercise should be a tool for those with PD, right up there with medications, DBS, and other interventions. As the physical therapist for Rune Labs, I have assisted with our product design, bringing more attention to physical activity via our activity tracker. We also have in the pipeline being able to sync your Apple Workouts from your Apple Watch right to our StrivePD app. With our new symptom data graph, users can now see how physical activity can have an effect on their tremor and dyskinesia. We also now include mobility metrics (step length, walking speed, double support %) on our clinician platform, so Movement Disorder Specialists can compare different time periods and see if their patient is improving or declining in mobility, and then see if the intervention is working or if a referral to PT or a Parkinson’s specific exercise program would be beneficial.

What type of goals do individuals with Parkinson’s have when working in the field?

Parkinson’s is an extremely heterogeneous disease and the progression differs for everyone. StrivePD empowers PwPD to understand their symptoms at a deeper level backed by objective and validated measures to see what influences impact their symptoms.
Here at Rune Labs, we emphasize the importance of being physically active, as it is the only disease modifying therapy that statistically shows a positive impact in slowing down progression of the disease. In the StrivePD app, we encourage individuals to log their physical activities and rest days (which is extremely important as well!) so they can see how it is helping them.
Individuals are able to add their own goals that matter to them and their management in the StrivePD app. It is extremely customizable and personalized to each individual.

What type of training and how long are the programs?

StrivePD is an application for people with Parkinson’s at any stage of their disease journey. It can be downloaded free of charge on the Apple iOS app store and is currently only available for Apple users. We are fully launched in the United States, but plan to make our way into the EU in the future.
For questions or concerns, users can contact support@runelabs.io. Our trained staff is available to help with onboarding, technical support, and even understanding the different features of the application.
We recommend users to wear the Apple Watch for more than 6 hours a day to collect sufficient data and interact with the app at least once a day. Most of our users use the application as a medication reminder as well. Once your information is inputted, you will receive medication reminders throughout the day asking if you took your medications or not. Everything that is self-reported and passively collected is timestamped in the app. We make sure the application is low burden and easy to use for all individuals.

What effect can it have on Parkinson’s fighters?

The app empowers individuals to understand their own symptoms just by wearing an Apple Watch. The beauty of this app is the ability to capture data passively coming from the Apple Watch and seeing those aggregated trends on their StrivePD insights charts. We encourage individuals to participate in physical activity, as it is the only disease modifying therapy that exists. As long as you log your physical activities and medications all while wearing your Watch, you can see the correlation between all three and how it may have impacted your PD symptoms.
Everything you log onto StrivePD is timestamped. There is a feature in the app that allows you to jot down notes (acts like a motor diary) where individuals can input anything they would like.
Logging symptoms can be voice logged via Siri as well.

What would you like to see as a future goal for your programs?

We are constantly making updates to our application and working with people with Parkinson’s to receive user feedback.
By the end of year, we hope to have over 5000 users. We want everyone who has Parkinson’s to use this platform.
We are currently launched in the United States, but we would love to expand to the EU in the future.
As AI and machine learning become better and better, we hope to make some new updates to the app that can allow us to predict symptoms for people with Parkinson’s.

What events do you participate in?

Rune Labs became an outlier among biotechs last year when we created our Patient Advisory Board. We are constantly engaging with people with Parkinson’s to ensure our product is helping others. We go through monthly user feedback interviews as well.
We partner and engage with several PD organizations and support groups across the country, and attend several national events. We participate in events like the Parkinson’s Foundation Moving Day, Davis Phinney Foundation Every Victory Counts, the World Parkinson’s Congress, Rock Steady Boxing classes, etc. We join several patient facing podcasts (The Parkinson’s Experience, Empowered Patients, etc.) and speak at multiple webinars, PD conferences and events.

How can someone get in touch and sign up to help? What is your website?

You can download the app today from the iOS app Store.
Our website is www.strive.group and we encourage everyone to register with us there
For questions or concerns, please email support@runelabs.io

If you had one final statement or quote you could leave for the Parkinson community, what would it be?

This is a quote I have framed in my office. It’s from Dr. Thomas Graboys who had an aggressive form of Parkinson’s with Lewy Body Dementia. He published this in the journal Movement Disorders: “The soul is where hope lives. Not a naive hope that I will, by some miracle, have my former self restored, but hope that tomorrow, and the day after, can still be days from which a measure of joy and meaning can be derived. And from hope springs optimism that, even with great limitations, there is life to be lived.”