PMDC research seeks insights on preventing falls among Parkinson’s patients

By Sean Gorman

Researchers at the VCU Parkinson’s and Movement Disorders Center (PMDC) are seeking insights that they hope can one day lessen the risk of falls and injuries among Parkinson’s disease patients.

Falling can be a significant danger for patients with Parkinson’s, which causes unsteadiness and loss of balance.

“There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done to understand how their brain is perceiving a fall and doing computations to prevent risk, to prevent falling,” says Nico Druck, an M.D. and Ph.D. student in VCU’s Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Druck and fellow researchers received a 2025-2026 PMDC Pilot Grant to analyze brain activity in Parkinson’s patients as they perceive they’re about to fall.

Patients with implanted Deep Brain Stimulation systems will walk on a bi-directional treadmill that can shift side-to-side to mimic the sensation of losing balance while respective brain signals are captured through their DBS system at the time of that perceived unsteadiness. A trained spotter behind the patient will ensure they don’t fall, and the treadmill has handrails the patient can hold on to.

“We believe this is the safest way to induce the perception of falling while minimizing the risk of actually falling,” Druck adds.

He says that brain signal data collected could be used to help perfect the next generation of DBS systems to better detect when a fall is about to happen— and then send a corrective electric charge to prevent it. That could help address a key concern about current DBS systems — that they overtreat patients with continuous electrical stimulation instead of providing targeted stimulation when it's needed most.

“There are so many different avenues that this type of information can go in,” Druck says. “That’s what makes a lot of this very exciting. A lot of the Parkinson’s research going on — both here and at other institutions — is so focused on creating this sort of library of all these data and signals to improve next-generation DBS devices.”

Druck says the idea for the research project started amid a conversation with Leslie Cloud, M.D., director of the PMDC’s Parkinson’s Disease Program, and Dean Krusienski, Ph.D., his research advisor and graduate program director at VCU’s Department of Biomedical Engineering. They discussed undertaking a research project using the bi-directional treadmill — which the PMDC recently acquired for rehabilitation care services for Parkinson’s patients.

“We talked back and forth, asking whether there was any sort of research avenue that could leverage the treadmill to help us understand something that might be lacking in Parkinson's research,” Druck says. “The idea of assessing falls naturally came out of that.”

The project is getting a major boost from the $75,000 PMDC grant. Now, Druck is seeking the state research approvals needed to get the project underway.

“This work is pretty similar to what I want to do long term in my career,” Druck says. “Knowing that an organization like the PMDC also views this work as something that could yield very powerful results, that’s very reassuring.”