Parkinson’s ON Panel Review
Review updated:
Parkinson’s ON is a logging and tracking app for people with Parkinson’s to keep track of their medication, symptoms and activities. Reviewers liked the medication tracking and the self-care content but some had issues with the medication reminders.
Highs
- Ideal for people who want to log Parkinson’s data in one place.
- Parkinson’s specific content.
- Developed by someone living with Parkinson’s.
- Mealtime windows to make sure your meals and medication align.
- Access to Parkinson’s podcasts.
Lows
- Data entry may be too time-consuming for some.
Meet our review panel
Our 5 reviewers are Craig, Dave, Julie, Julius and Patricia. They were asked to test out Parkinson’s ON for four weeks in April/May 2026 before sharing their feedback with us.
Symptoms
Our reviewers are living with a wide range of Parkinson’s symptoms, including fatigue, falls, stiffness, short-term memory loss, dyskinesia and bladder issues.
Location
The 5 reviewers are located in: Cambridgeshire, Denbighshire, East Sussex and North Yorkshire
Gender
- Men: 3
- Women: 2
Age range
Years since diagnosis
Background
Parkinson’s ON is an app that reminds you to take your medication on time, track your symptoms and log your daily activities. The app was created by the co-host of popular podcast 2 Parkies in a Pod Kuhan Pushparatnam.
Kuhan’s personal experience of living with Parkinson’s inspired the creation of the app. He told the Tech Guide: “I found that managing medication, symptoms and everyday life often meant relying on different apps, alarms, notes and reminders. I wanted something designed specifically around the realities of living with Parkinson’s. The aim with Parkinson’s ON is simple: to help people spend less time managing Parkinson’s and more time living their lives. I want people with Parkinson’s to feel more empowered.”
Development of Parkinson’s ON started 2023 and the app launched a year later. Since then, the app has continued to be developed, largely based on feedback from people with Parkinson’s. The app has had more than 10,000 downloads over the past two years and generates insights for the research community.
Kuhan added: “I’ve tried to make Parkinson’s ON useful and flexible without making it complicated. I want someone to be able to pick it up and immediately understand how it can help them. Another challenge has been finding the right balance between providing useful information and tools while recognising that an app can never replace advice or care from a healthcare professional.”
First impressions
To get started with the app, you need to create an account. Once your account has been created and you’re logged in, there are 5 steps to complete the set-up process.
Step 1: The first step is creating a profile. Enter your name, gender and year of Parkinson’s diagnosis.
Step 2: The second step encourages you to select the symptoms you want to track using an easy-to-tap tick-box button. There are 49 Parkinson’s symptoms to choose from, including both motor and non-motor symptoms.
Step 3: The third step lets you record the regular Parkinson’s medication you take. This can be selected from the pre-filled list or entered manually.
Step 4: The fourth step lets you provide more information on your medication. You can add the dosage amount and what time you need to take it. A handy ‘medication card’ with your selected timeslots is then automatically produced.
Step 5: If you want, you can set up a ‘supporter user’ (such as a partner or carer) who can view your data and log on your behalf. You can skip this step if this is not of interest.
The majority of the reviewers found the instructions easy.
“It was easy to install and set-up with a fairly intuitive interface,” Craig, a 64-year-old reviewer, told us.
Julius also found the instructions “clear and straightforward” but said “it was annoying that if you input something wrongly you had to save before going back in to delete the incorrect entry”.
Julie said she found the set up difficult and had to ask her grandson to help her. The 70-year-old said: “I was struggling to make sense of it, I had to ask for help eventually.”
Patricia said, while the instructions were “fairly clear,” she “didn’t get the hang of the app straight away”.
Daily use
Medication tracking
Parkinson’s ON reminds you to take your medication and encourages you to log when you’ve taken it . It also offers a smart medication scheduling tool. The dynamic scheduler records the time you take your medication and cleverly adjusts the next due times to maintain regular intervals using live timers.
Dave was diagnosed three years ago, aged 69. He said that the medication reminders and tracking were the “best bit of the app.”
“I used the app to create a diary type system for medications. It was useful but maybe a little too complex and time consuming for some.”
Patrica described the medication reminders as “useful.”
Julius found that the medication reminders were not persistent enough and “needs to nag more.” The 58-year-old, who was diagnosed three years ago, also found that if his phone was set to silent, he unfortunately didn’t notice the notifications.
The medication card is a clever little feature.
The app has a ‘live timer’ feature where you can see a live countdown to your next medication on your phone’s home screen. This is similar to widgets that fast food delivery apps use so you can see when your next medication is due at a quick glance without even opening the app.
Craig found the notification sound “irritating” so decided to turn them off. The notification sound mimics a shaking pill bottle. You do have the option of changing the chime if you’re not keen on the shaking pill bottle sound.
Parkinson’s ON also generates a ‘medication card’ for you which lists your medication and dosages. The card can be added to your phone’s virtual wallet with a QR code. This can be helpful in case of an emergency and someone needs to quickly get an overview of all the medication you take.
“The medication card is a clever little feature,” said a reviewer.
If you skip a medication, you can mark it and add a reason as to why it was missed.
Another medication feature is the ‘meal time window’. This is where the app calculates when it’s clinically safe for you to eat your next meal based on your medication schedule.
Patricia was diagnosed six years ago. She described the meal time window as “helpful”, but it was not relevant to her personal circumstances. “When carers can feed me, they can only visit me at certain times, which do not necessarily fit in with the times given on the app.”
Symptom tracking
The app encourages you to log your symptoms throughout the day. For example, if you’re out for a walk and start experiencing some gait issues, you can enter this symptom when it starts and rate its intensity by tapping one of five emotion indicators (They range from a very frowny face to an extremely happy face and look similar to phone emojis.) If you don’t want to or can’t log the symptom when it’s happening, you can log it later that day.
At first, Patricia was confused by the emoji ratings and called up customer service for help. “I grew up in a time when marks were given out of 10 rather than smiley faces. They were helpful with my query.”
Patricia added that there were both negatives and positives to tracking her symptoms. “It made me spend a lot of time brooding on what is wrong with me, which was both reassuring and disconcerting.”
Activity logging
You can also input your daily activities, log when you did them and rate how you felt about them. This includes exercise, socialising, hobbies and naps.
Dave told us: “I don’t, as a matter of course, record any of these activities. After a few early attempts, I decided these features would not be part of my daily routine.”
Julie agreed, she said: “It just seemed an awful lot for a little reward. I gave up in the end. It was just too much.”
“The app helped me focus on my daily regime,” Craig said.
There is a choice of 18 activities to log. You can also create a custom activity if you can’t find what you need from the pre-populated list.
Insights dashboard
The insights dashboard is an interactive dashboard that shows your medicine adherence, symptoms and activities trends. The data is shown in user-friendly pie charts and other graphs and infographics. You can export (download) the data as a PDF document or Excel spreadsheet.
The app helped me focus on my daily regime.
“It gave me something to think about,” said Dave. “As my Parkinson’s progresses, some parts may become more relevant and useful.”
Parkinson’s content
In the ‘Explore’ area of the app, you’ll discover a range of self-help content, including access to the 2 Parkies in a Pod podcast, guided yoga and meditation series and Parkinson’s research signposting.
Craig, whose most prominent Parkinson’s concerns are dyskinesia and constipation, really liked the additional content. He said: “I found these interesting and would welcome more. It’s nice to have it all in a single place.”
Value
The Parkinson’s ON app is free to download on Apple and Android smartphones. Most of the reviewers felt that for a free app, it was worth giving Parkinson’s ON a try.
Craig said: “As a free app it may be useful to those that don’t have an existing process to manage medication and a daily routine.”
All of the information provided in this review is accurate up to the time of publishing. Any major changes to the app or device will be reflected on the product page.