Finding a cure for Parkinson's disease has long been an elusive goal, stalled largely because it is so difficult to reliably measure whether a new drug is actually making a difference to how patients feel and function in their everyday lives. In this talk, I will mainly focus on presenting our current, ongoing TORUS project, which aims to build a system that can automatically, continuously, and objectively monitor patients' movement and physical function throughout the day — in their own home, without requiring clinic visits. This kind of monitoring can then run alongside a drug trial for its full duration, which can span up to two years. I will also cover some related computer vision-centric projects in assessing and quantifying actions in Parkinson’s disease patients at home, including turning and facial expressions.

Professor Majid Mirmehdi (MM) is a Professor of Computer Vision in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol, and member of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory and the Bristol Vision Institute (BVI). His research interests include healthcare monitoring , medical image/video processing, human and animal motion and behaviour understanding, and he has more than 300 journal and conference publications in these and other areas. MM is a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition and a Distinguished Fellow of the British Machine Vision Association. He is Editor-in-Chief of IET Computer Vision journal and an Associate Editor of Pattern Recognition. He serves on the Executive Committee of the British Machine Vision Association.