As neurodegenerative diseases grow more prevalent, the gap between what patients need and what clinicians prioritize in digital tools can quietly undermine care quality. A new international survey illuminates exactly where those gaps lie in Parkinson's disease management — and why alignment matters for the next generation of AI-assisted tools.
An anonymous cross-sectional survey distributed across five languages gathered responses from 255 participants spanning four stakeholder groups: persons with Parkinson's disease (PD), at-risk individuals, informal caregivers, and healthcare professionals. Conducted between December 2024 and October 2025, the survey probed current digital practices, attitudes toward predictive AI, and feature preferences across 41 questions, with chi-square analyses comparing group differences. Enthusiasm for predictive AI was broadly shared — symptom tracking emerged as the top desired feature across all groups, endorsed by more than 76% of respondents. Personalized treatment recommendations ranked second for both patients and clinicians. However, meaningful divergences surfaced elsewhere: healthcare professionals placed significantly greater weight on tools that improve patient and caregiver engagement, suggesting a systems-level orientation that patients and caregivers themselves did not prioritize to the same degree.
This finding matters because digital health tools designed without stakeholder-stratified input often solve the wrong problem for the wrong audience. The broad consensus around symptom tracking is encouraging — it suggests a concrete, high-priority entry point for AI development in PD care. Yet the divergence in secondary priorities highlights a familiar tension in patient-centered design: clinicians tend to optimize for care coordination, while patients focus on immediate symptom relief and autonomy. The study's exploratory, cross-sectional design and modest sample size of 255 limit causal or generalizable conclusions, and self-selection bias in an online survey format is a real concern. Still, the multilingual, international scope adds valuable nuance absent from most single-country digital health surveys. For the field, this is an incremental but practically useful contribution — a stakeholder map that developers and health systems can use to avoid building consensus tools that satisfy no one fully.