Chinese tech giant Tencent and London medical firm Medopad have teamed up to use artificial intelligence in the diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease.
A camera was used to capture the way patients move their hands to determine the severity of their symptoms.
The research team it was gathered has trained the system with existing videos of patients who have been assessed by doctors.
Dr Wei Fan, head of the Tencent Medical AI lab said;
“We use the AI to measure the deterioration of Parkinson’s disease patients without the patient wearing any sensors or devices”
The aim is to speed up a motor function assessment process, which usually takes more than half an hour.
Using smartphone technology developed by Medopad, the hope is that patients could be assessed within three minutes – and might not even have to attend a hospital.
Medopad is a London-based firm that has been developing apps and wearable devices to monitor patients with various medical conditions.
Medopad’s chief executive Dan Vahdat says that there was no British company that could match what Tencent offered as a partner.
“Our ambition is to impact a billion patients around the world and to be able to get to that kind of scale we need to work with partners that have international reach”
Wei Fan also emphasises the scale of his company’s ambitions in health AI, stressing that it is focused on helping to treat diseases that affect very large numbers of patients.
