Research overview
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Subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN DBS) is a well-established therapy for Parkinson's disease (PD), but conventional follow-up may miss postoperative fluctuations. Consumer-grade wearable devices present a scalable, low-burden means of longitudinal monitoring outside the clinic. We report a single-patient case of a 68-year-old man with PD who continuously wore an Oura Ring before and after STN DBS. Proprietary composite "Activity", "Readiness", and "Sleep" scores were analysed descriptively across predefined 60-day pre- and post-DBS periods, excluding the immediate perioperative period. Longer-term trends were assessed over 12 months alongside clinical outcomes. Early post-DBS, "Sleep Score" improved from 45.0 to 53.5 and "Readiness Score" from 67.5 to 71.0, while "Activity Score" and daily step count remained stable despite improvement in the Movement Disorder Society-Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale Part III score. This divergence suggested that clinic-based motor improvement did not translate into increased free-living activity. "Sleep" and "Readiness" scores remained higher during later follow-up following DBS optimisation, broadly coinciding with improvements in sleep and quality-of-life measures. This case illustrates how wearable-derived data may complement conventional postoperative assessments by capturing longitudinal patterns not routinely measured in follow-up. Larger studies are required to determine whether such consumer-grade measures can be interpreted as clinically useful digital biomarkers.
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