Leave a Voicemail, Help Fight Parkinson's

There is no cure for Parkinson's Disease, which affects more than 6 million people worldwide, and no objective test or biomarker (discoverable by a blood test) to diagnose it. Instead, doctors perform neurologic tests to assess patients' motor skills and rely largely on judgment, a process that can be time consuming and costly.

But Max Little, a Wellcome Trust/MIT fellow currently at the Media Lab, and colleagues at MIT and the University of Oxford aim to change that. Voice is affected by Parkinson's as much as limb movement, and Little and his team have created an algorithm to detect subtle changes in one's vocal cords and soft palate, including tremor, breathiness, and weakness.

Reports New Scientist:

"At the TEDglobal conference in Edinburgh, UK, Little explained how he and colleagues used their speech algorithm to process 263 recordings of 43 people, who had been asked to sustain six or seven vowel 'ah' sounds. After being trained on 10 impairments or 'dysphonias' in these recordings, the algorithm managed to diagnose Parkinson's speech markers 99 percent of the time in the lab."

Now, Little and his colleagues are asking for the public's help in building the system to screen for and monitor Parkinson's Disease. Called the Parkinson's Voice Initiative, the study aims to collect 10,000 voice recordings from those with and without the disorder. The website lists numbers to call from within the US, UK, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Argentina, Canada, and New Zealand. Participants simply make a low-cost, anonymous, three-minute phone call.

Voice-based tests are as accurate as clinical tests, reports The Parkinson's Voice Initiative website, and having this data can allow patients to be diagnosed remotely, quickly, and with little cost. Little also aims to speed the search for a cure through cost-effective mass recruitment for treatment trials and to one day provide high-frequency monitoring for individualized treatment plans with optimized drug timing and dosage.