A Young Inventor Takes On Parkinson's

Moonshot money for a project to stop freezing of gait

Jonathan Fisher

Here's a brain teaser. What connects Dominic Cummings, the invention of the internet, the universities of Brunel and Cambridge, and Parkinson’s? The answer is a 27 year old inventor Jonathan Fisher, who I met in Cambridge last week.

I’m no fan of the man who invented the Barnard Castle eye test but Dominic Cummings did have one idea which outlived his tempestuous stay in Downing Street. As a student of technology history, he had long been a fan of DARPA, the American defence research agency which was responsible for giving us the internet.

He wanted the UK to have a similar agency which would be given the. time, resources and freedom to come up with “moonshots”, attempts at breakthrough technology that would be unlikely to get funding via other routes. Despite his acrimonious departure from Boris Johnson’s government, the UK’s DARPA was born in 2023. ARIA, the Advanced Research + Invention Agency, has what it calls “opportunity spaces”, various fields of scientific inquiry which it thinks will benefit from its investments. One is Scalable Neural Interfaces, new ways of treating neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders with technology that interacts with the brain.

And here ARIA has teamed up with a consortium of academic, clinical and private sector researchers based in Cambridge, which has a track record of innovation in this field, to invest £12 million to generate new devices and systems. The project includes funding six* Neuroworks Fellows, giving inventors money and support to take an idea they have developed further down the road to commercial use.

Jonathan Fisher, who is developing a device to deal with freezing of gait, is one of them. I met him at Cambridge’s Judge Business School for a demo but first we discussed how he had got here. His father had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s just before Jonathan started an undergraduate. degree course in product design at Brunel University. As part of that degree, the dissertation which occupied the final year involved designing a product, and his thoughts immediately turned to his father’s predicament:

“My dad kept falling over and that led me to say, I can make whatever I want, let's do something for people with Parkinson's, because I'm not going to get sacked, I can't fail, and maybe I could do something quite cool.”

His research led him to zero in on the problems lots of poeple with Parkinson’s have walking, where they suddenly find they have frozen and cannot move. He learned about cueing, the idea that various signals - visual, auditory, or physical cues - can rewire the brain and get things moving again. But he was not impressed by the various devices he saw on offer - some were too expensive, others seemed clunky and obtrusive.

But Jonathan’s device, which he’s called Peter after his father, looks like something you’ll see dozens of people wearing on their commute or in the gym - a bone conductor headset. Once paired with a smartphone app, it sends a regular ‘blip’ sound to the user. Early tests with some Cambridgeshire people with Parkinson’s have proved promising - Jonathan showed me a video of an elderly man with a rolling walking frame grinding to a halt, frozen, until the Peter device was switched on and he seemed to thaw out, moving forward again.

But Jonathan stresses the word “early” - this is still very much a concept rather than a product, depending on a standard headset off the shelf. The ARIA grant came in the nick of time. After spending a year visiting factories on what sounds like a really useful Masters degree course in manufacturing in Cambridge he had given himself six months to see if he could take his idea further. Joining an accelerator programme at the Judge Business School was a help but he was about to run out of money.

Now the ARIA money - nearly £120,000 - will allow him to start designing his own headset, perhaps with sensors built in to measure the user’s Parkinson’s symptoms. But when it comes to using cueing to help people with Parkinson’s, there is a lot of competition out there.

The most obvious threat to Peter is Carl Beech’s Beech Band, a product now becoming widely available at a keen price. But Jonathan seems confident that his technology will prove superior to Carl’s vibrating wrist band: “I think an auditory cue for mobility and movement seems to be a lot more intuitive than vibration,,” he says.

What all of these devices need however is some solid evidence from clinical trials that they work. Here, Jonathan’s location in Cambridge with its deep pool of clinical expertise will be an advantage. Professor Roger Barker, the eminent neuroscientist whose work on cell replacement therapy for Parkinson’s I have written about, encouraged the young innovator to press ahead after he wrote to him about his Peter project.

Even with the ARIA grant and some prize winnings from a couple of innovator competitions, Jonathan Fisher faces a challenging time, designing a tool that has to look good, work smoothly and satisfy the MHRA medical regulator. But there won’t be any pressure on him from his backers - back in 2021 this is how Boris Johnson’s government outlined ARIA’s high-risk strategy:

“While it is anticipated that most programmes may fail in achieving their ambitious aims, those which succeed will have profound and positive impact on society..”

It is cheering to see a government body decide it is worth putting some of its high risk funds into Parkinson’s research. I will keep an eye on this project just in case it turns out to be one of the few to succeed - what a profound and positive impact that would be.

*Cambridge Neuroworks, which is running the scheme Jonathan is on, has been in touch to say the hope is that eventually there will be as many as 18 Fellows, with anyone from across the UK welcome to apply.