How studying blueberries led to an AI-powered Parkinson’s diagnostic tool
Bronwyn Bridges, who went through the Future of Healthcare Residency at the Roux Institute, wants to empower clinicians and patients to help assess the progression of Parkinson’s disease.
While studying the health benefits of blueberries, Bronwyn Bridges realized she wanted to help alleviate the challenges related to a shortage of neurology specialists in rural Canada.
Few experts on the nervous system were readily accessible to treat people in Newfoundland and Labrador Province, she found, let alone available to contribute to a study on how the berries might reduce the increasing limits Parkinson’s disease places on movement.
She shifted her Ph.D. focus from the fruit’s antioxidant power against the disease to finding a way to address the situation in rural Canada. It meant people living with the condition faced either long waitlists to see a doctor or not seeing one at all, both of which have implications for treating the disease as it progresses.
Bridges saw a way to try to solve this problem with PRIMS. This clinical decision support tool – which stands for Parkinson’s Real-Time Intelligent Medical System – uses 3D imaging and AI analysis to evaluate a patient’s motor skills, based on a widely-used scale backed by the Movement Disorder Society.
“It’s also a quality of life measure, trying to make sure you can get the help before it’s too late,” she told Northeastern Global News. “The preventative assessments are needed instead of reactive assessments.”
PragmaClin, the startup behind PRIMS, was co-founded by Bridges and Gord Genge, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2019.
They met while Bridges was studying for her Ph.D. Genge shared his own frustrating experience about a lack of access to specialists. Together, they created the startup in 2020.
She took the venture to the first ever cohort of the Future of Healthcare Founder Residency at the Roux Institute in Portland, Maine in 2023. And now, Bridges is one of eight fellows in the 2026 Women Who Empower Innovator Awards, a program through Northeastern University that invests in founders of businesses across categories of AI, technology, health, arts, entrepreneurship and social change.
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Bridges said honored by the recognition.
When she virtually met with the other finalists during the Women Who Empower cycle, Bridges thought, “Wow, these people are going to change the world.”
Parkinson’s disease is a progressive brain disorder that happens when the brain cells that make dopamine no longer function or die. Dopamine is a chemical that’s responsible for movement coordination. While there is no cure, there are treatments such as medication to help manage movement symptoms, which change as the disease progresses.
PRIMS can guide the patient through the assessment, scoring them on speech, facial expression, balance, tremors, gait and more. The entire process takes about 11 minutes. The clinician then uses the resulting report to decide how to move forward.
The device not only helps make evaluating patients faster for clinicians, but these assessments can be done by people who live in rural areas or have limited mobility.
While the device is still being validated, more than 10,000 movement recordings have been made across 15 clinical studies in six countries, Bridges said.
PragmaClin also has a mobile application in beta testing that prompts the patient for weekly assessments of cognitive function in between doctor’s appointments. This can help track the disease progression and give clinicians an idea if a patient’s medication should be changed.
Through the residency at the Roux Institute, innovators are offered a $50,000 investment, mentorship and access to facilities, analytics, design and legal services. There, Bridges learned how healthcare in the U.S. and Canada differed, and a lot of the nuances about the market she wanted to enter.
“We all had various challenges we were going to have to overcome, and they weren’t going to be overnight,” Bridges said of the residency cohort. “It allowed us to really think ahead on what next steps could be or how we could maybe get to market sooner so that we can provide the main product in the future.”
Bridges appreciated the support and willingness to open doors from those who had gone through the startup experience before.
One of those people was Tom Arena, an executive with experience in go-to-market and building and scaling ventures in the healthcare technology space, who mentored Bridges during the residency. Arena was struck by her passion and engaging demeanor, as well as her willingness to learn and grow.
She could teach him about movement disorders, and he could navigate her through the challenges and triumph of being a first-time CEO.
“It takes hustle to do what she does, and she’s the ‘chief hustler’,” Arena said.
