i smell the coffee all the time, i'm in seattle.
he got 10,000 anonymous calls, no way to verify the honesty of the caller, iseems like a publicity stunt. he still has to do some real studies with real patients over time to see how well his algorithms can measure pd.. other researchers are taking a more comprehensive approach.

i understand the value of early diagnosis or better diagnosis or easily accessible diagnosis. but until he actually publishes something for peer review that has gives an error rate rather than just blow his own horn i'm not going to take him seriously.

if he thinks he can detect a higher risk of developing pd before there are visual symptoms, unless he can correlate that with a person's genome or other biomarkers, he has to wait until pd can be proven. either way, he has to do careful research over time. and if there are too many false positives/negatives it's worse than useless.
where does tt say andy grove is supporting him? i think the article stated intel was developing it's own pd detection methods using voice/etc and shared some recordings with little.

ji wouldn't attempt to give an opinion on the "top5" but i'm not sure even 23ANDME would be included. imho, the jury is out on forced exercise until the results from larger clinical trials come out.

Soccertese,

You write that Little "seems like just an attention getter to me" and that his collection of 10,000 calls "seems like a publicity stunt". What evidence do you have for these assertions?

It seems to me that he's a good guy doing a good job with good technology.

John

[QUOTE=soccertese;951341]i

where does tt say andy grove is supporting him? i think the article stated intel was developing it's own pd detection methods using voice/etc and shared some recordings with little.
/QUOTE]

Try googling their names together. Max Little did not have PD on his radar until he ran across a colleague researching voice in PD for an Intel at home PD program of some sort that never saw the light of day. Intel had 50 recorded voices and all kinds of data, and their guy thought of Max's algorithms...a team for the voice initiative was formed from this post meeting Grove.

http://www.medgadget.com/2012/08/int...nitiative.html

These original recordings were part of a 6 month research project. Some of these tests are performed routinely by speech pathologists. Have you ever been assessed by one? They can tell you more about your condition than your neuro from your voice including severity and if only one or both sides of your brain are affected. Little is synthesizing a lot of what is already known.

[QUOTE=Conductor71;951954]

i'm certainly not criticizing speech analysis nor speech pathologists. nor science.
i used a speech pathologist for my son, loved him. i've never used one but might need to get some speech training as my pd progresses.

i'm just incredulous at the attention this guy got by speaking at TED yet he' was virtually unknown before TED. and how the news media just gushed all over him without questioning one thing he said or sought other opinions.

Little's latest (2013) paper:

"Objective: To assess the clinical value of online, self-reported PD symptom data recorded by users of the
health-focused Internet social research platform PatientsLikeMe (PLM), in which patients quantify their
symptoms on a regular basis on a subset of the Unified Parkinson‟s Disease Ratings Scale (UPDRS)."

Data
6074 PD patients on PLM
100 included in this study, qualification to be included 15 UPDRS scores.

Results
"Validation demonstrated the high-frequency self-reported data is consistent with a low-frequency clinical data
set in common use in clinical PD studies. The distributions of PLM to PD-DOC “off” scores are essentially the
same".

Obviously it can be perfected, but as I see it, the technology is in place. The question now is:
Is there the political will to run simple clinical trials in this way?

Reference

[1] M.A. Little, P. Wicks, T.E. Vaughan, A. Pentland (2013)
Quantifying short term dynamics of Parkinson’s disease using self-reported symptom data from an Internet social network
Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2013;15(1):e20, doi:10.2196/jmir.2112
http://www.maxlittle.net/publication..._pd_web_v2.pdf

John