The BBC's tech correspondent looks at how AI could change the treatment of Parkinson's disease.
For two weeks recently I got into a steady routine. At 10:30 each morning, I would sit at my kitchen table, strap three devices containing sensors to my right arm, and switch on a tablet computer. Then I would spend 20 minutes going through a series of exercises monitored by a man who popped up in a window on the screen.
For me that is an exciting prospect. I was diagnosed with Parkinson's in January 2019 and the first thing I was told was that there is no cure for this disease which afflicts something like 10 million people and is the world's fastest growing neurological condition.
Neurologists use what's called the UPDRS - the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Score - to calibrate the severity of a patient's symptoms. Earlier in the trial, other patients of Dr Tai had been assessed by him at his clinic, and his UPDRS ratings were then fed into the AI system as part of its learning data.
What is exciting is what comes next. Later this year, SERG Technologies, the spinout from Imperial working to commercialise this research, hopes to have something much less clunky - "a nice, lean simple device," says Ravi Vaidyanathan.
Further ahead, the wearable device could actually provide treatment. A new project supported by a £1m grant from the National Institute of Health Research, will explore shooting tiny amounts of current into the patient's muscle to control tremors.
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