How Adaptive Devices May Make Parkinson’s More Manageable

The new technology is helping people control their symptoms and regain quality of life

Sari Harrar,

AARP

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Published September 30, 2025

Glenn Harvey

For Deb Zeyen, Parkinson’s disease began as an unstoppable tremor in one finger.

She was in her early 60s, newly retired from her job as a marketing vice president for CBS Television in New York City and diving into new work protecting the environment on Mexico’s Baja California peninsula.

Over the next six years, her symptoms became increasingly severe.

“My speech slowed down, and my facial expression became blank. I felt endless fatigue,” Zeyen says.

She took a combination of levodopa and carbidopa to replenish dopamine, the brain chemical that diminishes in Parkinson’s. But she was plagued by the drug’s notorious side effect: uncontrollable jerking movements.

“I love snorkeling and scuba diving, but had to stop — I was swimming in circles,” says Zeyen, 78, who now lives in Berkeley, California. In 2021, she joined a study of an artificial intelligence–driven, nondrug treatment called adaptive deep brain stimulation.

First implemented about 30 years ago, deep brain stimulation (DBS) helps regulate Parkinson’s symptoms by sending electrical pulses from a control unit implanted in the chest to electrodes in deep brain areas affected by the disease. But conventional DBS is capable of sending only one constant signal, which may be too weak at times to control severe symptoms and too strong at other times.

“Parkinson’s symptoms fluctuate over the day due to things like stress, fatigue and medications wearing off,” says Simon Little, associate professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

Adaptive DBS (aDBS), which Zeyen now uses, is designed to get around that problem. It’s an AI-enabled advancement that senses the user’s brain activity levels and dials brain stimulation up or down as needed. The first aDBS system, Percept from Medtronic, was approved by the FDA in February 2025.

Zeyen’s aDBS system was implanted in 2021 as part of a UCSF research trial. At first, it was set to conventional, continuous stimulation.

“My tremor stopped immediately,” she says.

Four months later, researchers at UCSF switched on the system’s adaptive software after training the controller on Zeyen’s brain-activity patterns. Electrodes could then sense Zeyen’s rising and falling brain activity and adjust electrical stimulation to match it.

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Once the AI-adapted DBS kicked in, Zeyen regained her ability to make facial expressions. Her speech is quicker and clearer, and she uses a lower dose of her Parkinson’s medication, which means fewer side effects.

Her results are not unusual. In a multicenter study of 60 people with Parkinson’s who used Medtronic’s aDBS device for a year, participants reported having more time each day during which their symptoms were controlled — with minimal drug side effects and less “off” time when symptoms were worse; 89 percent said they preferred adaptive over conventional DBS.

“Adaptive DBS is about delivering a balanced therapy and getting patients to feel less aware of their disease,” says Scott Stanslaski, a senior distinguished engineer at Medtronic who started working on development of the aDBS system 17 years ago, along with colleagues there and doctors worldwide.

The software feature is available in new Percept devices and in models sold by Medtronic since 2020, he adds. Consumers can access it by meeting with their neurologist.

But it’s not right for everyone, says Little: “We think the best candidates are people who are getting some benefit from conventional DBS but are still getting fluctuations in their clinical state throughout the day.”

In May 2025, Zeyen felt ready to snorkel again. She wore a life preserver, and a friend held her hand as she slipped into the Pacific Ocean in a calm Baja California cove.

“I can’t tell you the joy it brought, feeling the water, swimming, being free,” she says. “I just loved sliding back into that place of wonder.”

Future advances for brain health

Detect Parkinson’s from earwax odors. Chinese scientists have pinpointed cases of Parkinson’s disease with up to 94.4 percent accuracy using an AI-trained olfactory device that senses changes in earwax compounds. In time, it could help people with this brain condition get referrals for diagnosis and treatment sooner.

Improve memory after brain injury. Traumatic brain injuries (TBI), frequently caused by falls and traffic accidents, affect an estimated 1 in 8 older adults and often lead to problems with thinking and memory loss. AI-trained deep brain stimulation improved memory in people with TBI by 19 percent, University of Pennsylvania scientists recently found.

Spot stroke emergencies with voice recognition. In a recent study, an AI-enabled voice-recognition program deployed at a Danish emergency call center identified strokes more accurately than human dispatchers did. The AI program was trained on thousands of voice recordings and transcribed calls to spot telltale warning signs.

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