Advancing Research

Artificial Intelligence is Unlocking New Possibilities for Parkinson’s Care

🧠 What will you learn in this article?

This article is based on a Parkinson’s Foundation Expert Briefing about how Parkinson’s disease (PD) care and research are leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) technology. It highlights how: 

  • AI is becoming a useful support tool in PD care, helping with tasks like documenting visits and tracking symptoms.
  • People with Parkinson’s can use AI tools to better understand symptoms, medications and next steps after appointments, though it’s important to protect privacy. 
  • To maximize your PD-related AI conversations. 
  • Apps, wearables and symptom-tracking tools combined with AI may help personalize care.
  • Researchers are using AI to accelerate Parkinson’s discoveries.
Woman using laptop

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is shaping how healthcare information is shared and used, including for people living with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Discover the value of AI tools, how to engage with them responsibly and why your care team’s guidance and judgment remain essential to high-quality care.

This article is based on a Parkinson’s Foundation Expert Briefing hosted by movement disorders specialist and clinical informaticist Allan D. Wu, MD, at Northwestern Medicine Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders Center, a Parkinson’s Foundation Center of Excellence.

Making Thoughtful Use of Smart Technology

Artificial intelligence has rapidly cemented itself as a supportive tool to enhance human expertise and provide people with around-the-clock access to healthcare information. However, people are wary that AI may weaken relationships between doctors and patients or chatbots may provide inaccurate answers. A 2025 YouGov poll found more than half of Americans were cautious or skeptical of AI, even as a 2025 Gallup poll found 99% of U.S. adults used an AI-enabled product weekly and 57% used generative AI for personal purposes.

Healthcare experts remain cautious, too. Lessons from the nationwide rollout of electronic health records (EHR) showed that new technology can create added burdens. Many EHR systems didn’t work well together, focused heavily on paperwork and billing and increased demands and burnout for doctors without improving patient care.

The rapidly expanding field of clinical informatics emphasizes using AI to enhance and support — not replace — human care. Physicians certified in this field use their expertise in medicine and technology to help improve healthcare systems and patient care, serving as a connection between technology and patient care.

About AI 

AI includes rule-based systems, statistical models, machine learning and deep learning, which are used in healthcare for documentation, pattern detection and prediction.

AI tools in healthcare can document visits, draft records for physician review, identify patient risks, support research or help manage patient communications. People have the right to ask where their health data is going and how it will be handled, or to opt out of AI-powered recording and documentation of healthcare visits.

AI processes and applies information in different ways:

  • Ambient AI, with patient consent, can capture patient-doctor conversations, freeing doctors to focus on face-to-face interactions.
  • Generative AI can transcribe medical conversations into visit records for the doctor to review and approve. 
  • Predictive AI commonly uses machine learning models to look at large data volumes to spot patterns and predict outcomes. In healthcare, it might be used to help identify a patient’s potential health risks. In research, it is being used for everything from drug development to the analysis of genetic data.

How People Are Using AI as a Healthcare Partner 

Many people are familiar with AI chat platforms and assistants – these use large language models trained on massive amounts of written and spoken data to simulate human conversation. They are trained to learn from interactions to deliver accurate, personalized responses.

People can leverage AI tools to:

  • Explain PD symptoms, diagnoses or medications. For example, Ask PAM (Parkinson’s Assistance Messenger) is an AI-powered chat tool from the Parkinson’s Foundation that provides trusted, evidence-based answers about Parkinson’s at your fingertips.
  • Understand medical bills or insurance benefits.
  • Organize next steps after a healthcare visit.

While AI can be helpful, use caution when using it: 

  • Protect your privacy. Never provide sensitive information.
  • AI can sometimes reinforce incorrect ideas.
  • AI does not understand accountability or moral responsibility.
  • AI can present false information as fact. It can also present biased information.
  • Be wary of “AI slop” low-quality content generated without human effort.

How to Maximize Your PD-related AI Conversations

Get the most reliable information when working with AI:

  • State the goal. “Help me prepare for my doctor appointment.” 
  • Provide background: “I was diagnosed 6 years ago. I have tremor dominant Parkinson’s. I am taking carbidopa/levodopa. My tremor has worsened over time.”
  • Specify resources. “Reference the Parkinson’s Foundation guide to Preparing for a Medial Appointment.”
  • Explain how you want the message delivered: “Give me a short, bulleted list in plain language.”
  • Ask for broad perspectives. “You are a Parkinson’s expert.” Or “What perspective and questions might my neurologist, physical therapist, social worker, psychologist or family members have?” 
  • Ask for pros and cons, alternatives and multiple options.
  • Save your work. AI conversations are often temporary. 

Sometimes, AI will ask questions for more context. This is best used when you aren’t sure what information you need. “I need to talk to my neurologist about deep brain stimulation. Before you respond, ask me questions you need to give me useful guidance.”

Other ways to guide output are to ask AI to at a sixth-grade level or to be concise. Ask it to review its response and where the answer could be improved.

The Potential for AI in PD Care

Woman looking at Smartwatch

People living with Parkinson's may find it difficult to accurately remember when symptoms occurred or how they changed over time. Symptom-tracking tools and wearables — including smartphone apps, Apple Watch-based tools and devices such as Personal KinetiGraph and StrivePD — are helping monitor symptoms over time. Other wearable technologies include devices that monitor cognition, tremor, freezing of gait, sleep and speech.

AI holds the promise to combine data from these devices with pre-visit surveys, Parkinson’s disease rating scales and patient diaries to help care teams develop personalized wellness plans that adapt as symptoms and needs change, and to assist in connecting people with relevant clinical trials.

Tech Tools for Daily Living

Explore apps and digital tools that can help you track symptoms and support daily life with Parkinson’s.

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How AI Is Driving Deeper Insights into PD

Researchers are using AI to expand their understanding of Parkinson’s:

  • Bioinformatics, the use of AI to assist in analyzing biological information, is being harnessed in trials such as PD GENEration: Powered by the Parkinson’s Foundation, an international study offering genetic testing and counseling for people living with Parkinson’s at no cost.
  • AI and machine learning are helping process and interpret data from the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI), a Michael J. Fox Foundation-sponsored study to identify and measure PD biomarkers — substances in the body that provide information about health.
  • Artificial intelligence is helping researchers discover biologic subtypes of Parkinson's by examining data from skin biopsies, genetic statistics and brain imaging. 
  • Alpha-synuclein is a brain chemical that misfolds and clumps in people with Parkinson’s. AI is helping researchers better understand the process and how it is linked to disease progression.
  • AI has the potential to help speed up new drug discoveries by identifying which compounds might target PD.

Emerging Developments

On the horizon, look for AI tools that:

  • Offer continuous passive monitoring of PD symptom patterns such as voice, gait and typing. 
  • Reach out when a wearable device signals a change.
  • Send adaptive medication reminders based on patterns of “on” times, when PD medication is working well, and “off” times, when symptoms return.
  • Provide AI symptom triage, assessing symptoms and suggesting next steps.
  • Automate creation of healthcare action items, referrals and automatic scheduling.

AI, along with PD GENEration and other research studies, is also laying the groundwork for precision medicine — the aim of tailoring treatment to fit the needs of everyone with Parkinson’s. It also holds the potential to further refine surgical planning and programming for DBS devices used to treat Parkinson’s symptoms. 

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