Parkinson’s sufferer Michael J Fox inspired 15-year-old to create a new program to spot disease

He is the star of the blockbuster Back To The Future films who was told he had Parkinson’s disease aged just 29. Erin Smith, now 19, learned how to code from scratch and within a year she had created a prototype that could identify telltale clues using video footage She saw how, as a result of the neurological disease, Fox’s facial expressions lacked emotion even when he was enthused. Similar facial recognition technology is used to scan CCTV images for faces of known criminals, but Erin’s programme had a ‘machine learning’ capacity to get continually better at spotting the signs of Parkinson’s. Fox Foundation, which backs research to find a cure for the disease, funded two pilot studies, which concluded Erin’s FacePrint programme was 88 per cent accurate at distinguishing Parkinson’s sufferers from healthy people. Fox inspired Erin Smith – a huge fan of the movies – to invent a way to spot the condition ten years earlier than is usually the case She told The Mail on Sunday: ‘I have always been a big fan of Back To The Future.