Day 4 Fieldwork 2026

And we’re off to another busy day! We started our morning visiting the Shashkin Outpatient Clinic, where we met with partner Dr. Chingiz Shashkin and two of his colleagues. Here, we discussed the appearance, comfort, and function of the device, the TremorAid app, and the website to take notes for improvement. Dr. Shashkin also suggested that we sell the device to the private clinicians as a prescription, agreeing with what we concluded yesterday. He also stated that his clinic works with 200 patients a week and performs around 400 surgeries a year, important statistics for understanding market size and frequency of invasive treatment options. In addition, we were informed that the primary Parkinson’s medication, Levodopa, has side effects of constipation, changes in sleep, loss of appetite, and overall mood changes. This was very valuable information, because we decided we needed to include these check-in parameters in our app for the clinician to also monitor. They also suggested that we adjust our algorithm to account for differentiating between resting and cardiac tremors, since they are important to clinicians in contextualizing the severity of the patient’s tremors. Finally, the team of doctors believed that we should include drop-down options to avoid patients having to type, larger text, and more translations (which would be approved by clinicians) since many of their patients come from all over Central Asia, including Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and more. Following our visit, we returned to AlmaU to implement this feedback into our algorithm and conduct more research on the effects of Levodopa.

Later in the afternoon, we returned to Shashkin Clinic to meet with neurologist Dr. Myrzaev Zhanibek. Here, we also displayed our device and asked for feedback on our venture. Similar to the morning meeting, Dr. Zhanibek suggested that we use our algorithm to specify between types of tremors, but also to consider different disorders that cause tremors, such as essential tremor, in addition to differentieating tremors and dyskinesia. He also suggested that the clinicians should have the ability to schedule the patient’s medication schedule on their website. Our meeting was super informative, and we were also able to schedule times to shadow his surgery and meet with his patients.

For the evening, we had the priveledge of going to the Kazakh National Opera and Ballet Theatre to watch the opera Birzhan-Sara, a classic Kazakh love story. It was absolutely beautiful and a fantastic insight into Kazakh culture.