It’s Brain Awareness week and today HIHI launches its latest FemTech Clinical Evaluation study with My Moves Matter
Irish female founder and patient innovator offers new hope to Irish women with a bespoke health app which helps track the impact of hormones on controlling symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease
This week marks Brain Awareness Week 2025. It also marks the launch of Health Innovation Hub Ireland’s most recent clinical evaluation study with My Moves Matter who have developed a pioneering health app that tracks the impact of women’s hormones on Parkinson’s symptoms. This it timely, as last week marked International Women Day with the key theme “Accelerate Action”. This app promises to do just that.
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that primarily affects movement. The disease gradually progresses over time and is characterised by a variety of motor and non-motor symptoms, such as tremors, changes in walking patterns, stiffness, as well as difficulties with balance and speech. At present, there is no known cure for Parkinson’s Disease (PD).
My Moves Matter is the company behind this new app and it was co-founded by registered dietitian Richelle Flanagan after she noticed something was wrong with her handwriting when trying to document a note in a patient’s chart. She was diagnosed with Young Onset Parkinson’s Disease (YOPD) shortly after the birth of her daughter.
In response, this Irish female founder and patient innovator co -founded My Moves Matter and developed an app to help women manage their PD symptoms in line with their menstrual cycles. The app is proving a success and currently has over 1600 users from 47 countries. My Moves Matter aims to improve the lives of Irish women living with PD and was one of the winners of Health Innovation Hub Ireland’s Femtech competition in 2023.
A medical paper entitled ‘Unmet Needs of Women Living with Parkinson’s Disease: Gaps and Controversies’, co-authored by Richelle Flanagan, highlights the issues women with the PD experience, especially from a psychosocial standpoint, which have been overlooked. There is a need for management of PD which considers the impact of the hormonal stages women experience, including menstrual cycles.
Current clinical guidelines fail to address the nuanced impact of hormonal changes on PD symptoms adequately, resulting in fragmented care for women. The My Moves Matter app has come up with a solution and seeks to bridge this gap by enabling detailed patient-reported outcome tracking. This initiative not only aims to gather specific data to understand the link between hormone fluctuations and PD but also to inform the development of personalised patient care programmes, including medical nutrition therapy tailored to individual needs.
The app is unique as it puts people with Parkinson’s disease in control of understanding their own body and mind’s reaction to PD. The app helps people to understand their individual symptoms, what triggers them and what works or does not work for their individual experience.
This patient reported symptom tracker has several notable features: medication reminders tablets, patterns identification, hormonal impact tracking, gain knowledge, share decision making and help find answers.
The results of the clinical evaluation study with Health Innovation Hub Ireland were impressive. Clinicians recognised the main benefits of the My Move Matter app which included the ability to view detailed data between clinic visits and to accurately track medication user-friendliness for patients and staff. The clinicians, PD Neurologists and nurses, stressed the importance of tracking hormonal impacts in women with PD as it is currently underserved and they highlighted this aspect as an excellent feature of the app. Knowing detailed information such as medication timing, doses, mealtimes, sleep patterns and bowel movement patterns was also considered critical for comprehensive patient management.
Dr. Tanya Mulcahy Director of Health Innovation Hub Ireland and founder of FemTech Ireland commented on the importance of the app in addressing women’s health issues:
“Recognising the unique ways Parkinson’s and other neurological conditions manifest in women isn’t just about fairness—it’s about better diagnosis, better treatments, and better lives. This pivotal work conducted by Richelle through the My Moves Matter App highlights how women’s hormone cycles impact symptoms and treatment efficacy. This is such important work and should be highlighted and commended.
The whole area of women’s health and in particular the different ways conditions manifest and respond to treatments between men and women is fascinating but still in its infancy, with technology advancements like this, we can track interrogate and evaluate to deliver better outcomes for patients”.
Richelle Flanagan welcomed the launch of the study to mark International Brain Awareness Week:
“We were delighted to win the HIHI FemTech opportunity to carry out a clinical evaluation of the utility of the My MovesMatter app with Parkinson’s neurologists and Parkinson’s Disease specialist nurses. It provided us the opportunity to learn what they found useful in the current app and what would make life easier for them. We look forward to acting on their invaluable advice.”
Read the full case study here https://hih.ie/downloads/case-studies/HIHI-case-study_My-Moves-Matter.pdf