Paul Detlefsen, age 44, of Iselin, New Jersey, has had Young Onset Parkinson’s disease for eight years. Like a lot of us! However, he is the first person to be able to control his DBS voltage with his iPhone. The iPhone communicates with the DBS battery implanted in his chest via Bluetooth.
The advantages are two-fold:
1. He doesn’t need the big bulky gizmo that other Parkies with DBS use. He can just sit there with his iPhone (at Starbucks, in church, on the now extra-slow trains heading from New Jersey into Manhattan) and tweak the voltage strength and frequency, looking “normal,” as if he were text messaging his congressional representative to vote “No” on repealing Obamacare.
2. From his iPhone he can email videos of his current symptoms to his doctors. They can quickly respond with voltage and frequency adjustments, which he can then make himself.
Here’s the same info, but as a direct quote from New York’s Channel 11’s website:
In the past, patients used to have to carry around bulky remotes to control the electrodes in their brain. In order to have the system adjusted, they’d have to come for an office-visit.
Today, Detlefsen can e-mail videos of his symptoms to the medical team at JFK [JFK Neuroscience Institute]. They’ll then respond with a healing high-tech prescription of voltage and frequency adjustments, delivered right to the palm of his hand.
“I could be at the bar or the dinner table, wherever, and no one knows what’s going on,” he said. “They just think I’m on my phone.”
And here’s Channel 11’s video, which brings it all to life. Just click on the picture below, which will take you to the video and the Channel 11 web page:
