Sara Riggare

Sara Riggare is an engineer by training. She experienced her first symptoms of Parkinson's disease around 1984, at 13, but wasn't diagnosed until nearly 20 years later. In 2010 she decided to combine her patient experiences with her engineering skills to try to improve things for herself and others with chronic diseases so she started studying at a masters programme in health informatics at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. Sara is currently a doctoral student at Karolinska and the topic of her research is "Personal observations as a tool for improvement in chronic disease". She is an actively engaged patient with a vast network across the chronic disease community and blogs at www.riggare.se.

Sara Riggare's declaration of competing interests:

I have read and understood the BMJ Group policy on declaration of interests and declare the following interests:

Personal financial interests:

• Current:
  • Employment at Karolinska Institutet
  • Co-founder and owner of Nerve Sweden AB
• Previously:
  • Consultant to the Cure Parkinson’s Trust for Parkinson’s Movement
• Travel and accommodation paid for by:
  • World Parkinson Coalition Inc for participating in the World Parkinson Congress 2013 in the capacity of ambassador
  • Stanford Medicine X for speaking at Medicine X 2013
  • Sage bionetworks for co-organising and participating in a workshop at Stanford in March 2014
• Paid for speaking and/or writing for:
  • Digital Health Days conference in Stockholm, August 2013
  • Kairo’s Future
  • EyeforPharma
  • HiQ (planned speaking)

Organisational financial interests:

• Funding during 2013 from VINNOVA, the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems (http://www.vinnova.se/en/)
• Future funding from the Swedish Government’s special plan for improving care for people with chronic diseases (2014 and possibly also 2015)

Non-financial interests:

• Governmentally appointed advisor to the Swedish Medical Products Agency (www.lakemedelsverket.se)
• Member of the patient advisory council to the Swedish Agency for Health and Care Services Analysis (http://www.vardanalys.se)
• Ambassador for the World Parkinson Congress 2016
• Ambassador for the Swedish Brain Fund (http://www.hjarnfonden.se)
• Advisor to http://www.fundmymedicalresearch.org