What is AI and how can it help if you have Parkinson’s?

The term ’Artificial Intelligence’ (AI) seems to be everywhere these days. Here’s what you need to know.

The term ’Artificial Intelligence’ (AI) might feel like a bit of a mystery if you’re not keeping up with the latest tech buzzwords, but chances are you’ve encountered AI content in the last year – whether you wanted to or not. 

If you’ve scrolled through Facebook or even searched something in Google recently, you’ve probably come across text and images generated using AI. You might not have even realised you were interacting with AI, as the technology has become more sophisticated and convincing to even the trained eye at an alarming rate. 

Not to be left behind, healthcare apps and medical research fields have also been leveraging AI smarts recently. The question is, how can AI help you as a person with Parkinson’s? And, just as crucially, how far should you trust this largely unregulated technology? 

What is AI?

The term ‘AI’ refers to a computer’s ability to perform advanced tasks typically associated with human intelligence. Examples include learning, reasoning, decision-making and problem-solving. 

Though it’s been more than 70 years since computer scientists began laying the groundwork for AI, the technology has made huge strides in recent years thanks to a growing public interest in Large Language Models (LLMs). 

LLMs are AI systems that have been trained on enormous amounts of data collected from across the web. This teaches them to ‘understand’ and replicate human speech patterns. LLMs are also the backbone behind generative AI platforms, enabling chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Gemini to generate impressive bodies of text and image generators to paint detailed visuals from scratch. 

These days, it can feel almost impossible to find an app or service that hasn’t integrated AI in some way – and healthcare apps are no exception. 

How can AI help if you have Parkinson’s? 

There are several apps in our Tech Guide catalogue that leverage AI in their services, which you can look at here.

Perhaps the most heavily integrated of those is Turnto, an app that uses AI to combine the latest medical breakthroughs, tips and treatments from news stories and research papers to keep you up to date on the latest in the Parkinson’s world. You can learn more about Turnto here. 

Whispp is another app (found here) which uses AI in a very different way by using the technology to convert whispered or vocal cord-impaired speech into a clearer, natural-sounding voice during phone calls. 

Another app worth mentioning is PD Buddy, a symptom-tracking app with an AI assistant happy to provide daily advice on how to better manage your symptoms. You can learn more about PD Buddy here. 

Of course, you can also use chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini to learn more about the condition, find new ways to manage your symptoms and connect with resources. You can even use AI assistants to take notes or compose text messages if you have difficulty typing.

You may have already come across Parkibot, a chatbot designed specifically to answer questions about Parkinson’s. You can try chatting to the AI assistant hereopens in new tab. 

That being said, we would never recommend taking any medical advice from AI without doing more in-depth research and consulting your doctor or healthcare provider beforehand. LLMs take their knowledge from a variety of online sources, and that information can too often be outdated, conflicting or outright wrong. 

How is AI propelling Parkinson’s research? 

AI also has its uses in medical research. In fact, the technology has been used to diagnose Parkinson’s and identify drivers of the condition in recent years – including in Parkinson’s UK’s own Brain Bank. 

In 2022, a team made up of the Parkinson’s UK Brain Bank at Imperial College London, NHS England, Parkinson’s UK, and AI specialists Polygeist set out to investigate if AI could be used to improve the speed and accuracy of Parkinson’s diagnoses. They found that, of 300 with a Parkinson’s diagnosis and 50 without, the AI model was able to diagnose Parkinson’s with greater than 93% accuracy in just four minutes. Learn more about that research hereopens in new tab. 

A year later, research published in Nature Machine Intelligence demonstrated AI’s ability to identify which of the four altered pathways in the body was the key driver of a person’s Parkinson’s with 95% accuracy. This is information that could be used to subtype Parkinson’s in the future in order to develop more personalised treatments. You can learn more about that study hereopens in new tab. 

More recently, researchers at University College London have developed a new blood test which they say is 100% accurate in identifying Parkinson’s. The team reached this conclusion by using AI to analyse more than 1000 different proteins in blood samples and identifying the subtle changes in eight proteins consistently found in those with Parkinson’s. You can find more information about that research hereopens in new tab.  

The downsides to AI

Like the internet itself, there are positive and negative sides to AI. While machine learning and LLMs have the potential to be life-changing for people with Parkinson’s, the downsides could be equally catastrophic. 

Many people and environmental groups have raised concerns about the impact of AI on the planet. Data centres require vast amounts of electricity to train and run AI models, as well as huge volumes of water to keep them cool. Furthermore, the burning of fossil fuels in many data centres produces a significant amount of CO₂, while also creating electronic waste which can contain hazardous substances, like lead and mercury, according to the UN Environment Programmeopens in new tab. 

There are also questions surrounding the ethics of AI, as the industry remains largely unregulated in terms of sustainability, safeguarding and its development. Many LLMs have been trained using content scraped from the web without explicit permission from the individual behind that content. This means that your writing, artwork or even social media posts may have been used to teach AI how to think and what text and images to generate without your knowledge or consent. 

This also means the information shared by AI can at times be biased, unreliable or outright wrong, depending on the data the model has been trained on. You should never trust AI to make important decisions without doing your own research alongside it.

The good news is that the EU passed its Artificial Intelligence Act in 2024, prohibiting certain uses of AI and requiring companies to comply with certain transparency requirements under EU law, which is likely to impact the tech industry outside of the EU too. However, while General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) touches on the topic of AI in terms of personal data, there is currently no AI-specific regulation in the UK.