“It was incredibly traumatic but exciting at the same time. There was so much fear and emotion hanging in that moment. I wanted it to work so badly.”

Emma Lawton is 33, and one of the 2% of people with Parkinson’s who have been diagnosed with the neurological condition before they are 40. She is sitting in Microsoft’s office in London, describing the moment she first used the “Emma Watch” – a wrist-worn device that aims to significantly reduce the almost constant limb tremors associated with Parkinson’s.

Lawton, a creative director, was wearing the watch (top) when she put pen to paper for a recent BBC documentary called The Big Life Fix, which changed her life forever.

“I was petrified. What if it didn’t work? So when it did work, I thought ‘OK, that’s amazing’. I couldn’t really get my head around it. And then when it carried on working…”

At that moment Haiyan Zhang, who invented the watch as part of a research team, walks through the door and greets Lawton warmly before she has to sit for more photos.

“Haiyan is awesome,” Lawton says when Microsoft Research’s Innovation Director is out of earshot. “She got me instantly. The watch has an interchangeable strap; that’s so me, the fact that it can have different colours. She sussed that I wanted something that was cool, and that my boyfriend would be jealous of, because he’s all about technology. It didn’t look like it had come out of a Parkinson’s magazine for an old person. She got all that. And she was incredibly human about the process. I just thought: ‘Wow, this is someone who not only understands the technology behind things but also understands the humans behind things’.”