There is no cure for Parkinson’s disease—yet—but doctors can help patients manage the most debilitating symptoms of involuntary muscle tremors. In Feb. 2025, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved BrainSense Adaptive deep brain stimulation, a new pacemaker-like device for the brain that can respond more effectively to a Parkinson’s patient’s changing brain-signaling patterns, giving people better control of their muscle movements. Previous versions could only be left on continuously, meaning nerve cells were stimulated even when patients weren’t experiencing involuntary movements, such as after taking medications, which most patients do to control their symptoms.
The self-adjusting device is the first of its kind, and for Scott Stanslaski, a senior distinguished engineer at Medtronic, it’s the product of three decades of developing implantable medical devices for the brain. Over the past 10 years, he and his team took what they learned from products that continuously stimulated the brain to identify the signals specific to the declining dopamine levels that affect motor cells in Parkinson’s. These signals are so small that it took advances in detection technology to pick them up. Then it was a matter of combing through data from patients whose brains were constantly stimulated to pick out these miniscule signals and develop an algorithm to automatically dial up or down a more responsive type of deep brain stimulation. “There were a lot of epic fails in the early phases to figure out the right sensing technology,” he says.
Studies the company conducted in collaboration with researchers at academic centers showed the device helped patients avoid more drastic changes in involuntary muscle movements as the device continually adjusted to provide the right amount of stimulation in a highly individualized way. Ultimately, the BrainSense Adaptive stimulator could help patients keep their symptoms under control for longer, even as their disease progresses.