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What is the Tech Guide?

The place for consistent and reliable information about devices and apps to support people with Parkinson's to live full lives.

Parkinson's UK created the Tech Guide so that people with Parkinson's, and their families, friends and carers, can make the right decisions for themselves about all the devices and apps that claim to be able to help improve their quality of life.

To do this, we provide trusted reviews based on the lived experience of people with Parkinson's, and maintain a catalogue of the various products that are on the market. We back this up with information about Parkinson's and evidence-based articles that will help you decide what's right for you, in your unique circumstances.

We produce the Tech Guide on the web, in print and by email, so you can get the information you need in the way that's right for you.

Discover

The Tech Guide has a wide range of products in its catalogue - and the list is always growing! We aim to include everything that meets these three criteria:

  • devices and apps that are available for personal purchase in the UK by people with Parkinson’s
  • that are marketed as helping with specific symptoms of Parkinson’s
  • that involve the specific application of digital technology in hardware or software

The Tech Guide aims to be a single place where you can come to find out about any devices or apps related to Parkinson's.

Understand

Knowing what's on offer is useful but isn't enough. The Tech Guide gives you consistent information about each product in the catalogue - how expensive are they, how heavy are they, what do they claim to do?

For many products in the catalogue, we can only tell you what the makers claims are - we can't verify the accuracy of those claims. But where there is published scientific evidence, or even small-scale trials, we will share that information.

In many cases, the claims made for devices depend on wider scientific work. Fortunately, Parkinson's UK has spent many years helping to explain and promote the science around Parkinson's. So the Tech Guide also points you to plain-English articles that can help understand the condition, and the ways that technology may be able to help. And, importantly, the limits to what technology can do.

Trust

This is the core of the Tech Guide - helping you decide which devices and apps to trust with your time, your money and your health. (Or, indeed, to decide that the right answer for you is "none of them".)

We do this by providing in-depth consumer reviews of devices and apps from our catalogue. We take these and give them to a panel of people with Parkinson's (generally 6 people, with a range of ages, living arrangements, time since diagnosis etc.). This panel then lives with the products for at least 4 weeks, and shares their feedback with us across a wide range of questions.

The reviews we publish are written by our team based solidly on this feedback - they reflect the views of people from the Parkinson's community. And they go through a stringent approval process:

  • editorial checks within the Tech Guide team
  • oversight from a Specialist Panel of doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists and academics
  • editorial checks from the Parkinson's UK Content team
  • and finally sign-off by our Steering Group, made up of people with Parkinson's and friends and family members

We can't recommend any product as being right for you, but we can hopefully help you make more-confident decisions for your own needs.

Access

We can hopefully help you decide to get (or not get) a particular product. But we also want to help you actually get it. This can be as simple as the "Buy" link or "Download" link. But it can be much more.

There may be things you need to know before you can actually get a product - everything from "what is an app and how do I get one?" to "what are my rights as a consumer?"

There may be financial barriers, because some of these products are very expensive. We can't help with this directly, but can point you to information about benefits and grants that might help. (And keep your eyes peeled, because we have some exciting plans for next year!)

Share

We want everyone from the Parkinson's community to be able to take part in and benefit from the Tech Guide. So we're going to make it as easy as we can to share the Tech Guide and our reviews with your friends, family and wider network. This means everything from having a physical copy of the Tech Guide to hand round at a meeting or display in a waiting room, to update emails when something new is published.

And by the end of 2024, we're also going to start welcoming your views about products as well. To supplement our own Trusted Reviews, anyone from the community who's tried a product will be able to share their experiences (good or bad) to help other people make better decisions.