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Tech firm Tencent aims for 3-minute Alzheimer’s diagnosis with new partnership

pharmafile | October 8, 2018 | News story | Research and Development, Sales and Marketing Alzheimer's, pharma, tencent 

Chinese tech firm Tencent has partnered up with London-based healthcare technology firm Medopad in a big to accelerate the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease through the use of artificial intelligence (AI).

The technology is able to determine the severity of disease symptoms by using a camera to capture the way a patient moves their hands.

This will then be combined with smartphone technology developed by Medopad in the hopes of bringing motor function assessment times down from over half an hour to three minutes, as well as potentially eliminating the need to visit hospital. The ultimate goal is to allow doctors to provide and modify care remotely.

“We use the AI to measure the deterioration of Parkinson’s disease patients without the patient wearing any sensors or devices,” said Dr Wei Fan, head of the Tencent Medical AI lab, adding that healthcare is “not only about what happens in the clinic, but what happens in the real world.”

The details of the partnership follow Medopad’s announcement in February that it had signed deals with a number of Chinese firms to the tune of £100 million.

Medopad CEO Dan Vahdat also commented: “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.”

Matt Fellows

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