Yoshikuni Mizuno Lectureship Award

I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to get to know Prof. Mizuno in 2005 when I returned to Thailand from UCLA to establish the Chulalongkorn Centre of Excellence for Parkinson’s Disease and Related Disorders, the same year that Prof. Mizuno (with Prof. Philip Thompson) established the Asian-Oceanian Section (AOS) of the MDS. His vision was to foster research collaboration and education in Movement Disorders within the region, especially in the field of basic science. I am in debt to Prof. Mizuno for all excellent opportunities he has given me to be involved in his educational activities in the AOS and for introducing me to several prominent colleagues in Japan and the rest of the AOS who have all supported me to get my research started in Thailand and beyond. 

Technology provides significant advantages for care provision, as patients’ symptoms can be measured quantitatively and remotely, presenting efficient solutions for many of the regional care challenges. With this in mind, several wearable devices are now being developed for tremor, finger dexterity, gait, electronic diary, and nocturnal symptoms for the purposes of improving diagnostic accuracy and monitoring treatments. Further developments have expanded to therapeutic indications, including laser-guided walking sticks, PD gloves for tremor, and PD shoes for freezing of gait, where machine learning has been adopted to improve better prediction and accurate detection of those symptoms. In addition, national implementation of the laser-guided walking stick has demonstrated the cost effectiveness of such technologies for patients and their families. Our next step is to implement a national screening program for PD using digital platforms to identify patients in earlier stages of the disease and at-risk individuals for future preventive trials. Our research is made possible through the ongoing support of several collaborators within the AOS and, most importantly, our patients and their families.