[Tupelo3]

This is a great concept open to the science community:

Parkinson’s disease could one day be monitored and managed by a 10-second phone call. At least, that’s the hope driving the Patient Voice Analysis (PVA), a collaboration between mathematician Max Little, the online community PatientsLikeMe, and nonprofit research organization Sage Bionetworks. The aim is to develop voice analysis tools that can map Parkinson’s disease progression.

The PVA combines data from two sources: phone-based voice recordings that were collected and analyzed by Little’s voice-analysis software for vocal markers associated with Parkinson’s disease, and self-reported symptoms captured through PatientsLikeMe’s Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (PDRS), a tool the organization developed to capture treatment effectiveness and disease progression in about five minutes.

“By combining these two data sets we hope to identify relationships between speech disturbances, such as voice tremors, and typical clinical signs of Parkinson’s, such a limb tremors, so that it becomes possible to monitor patients’ progression with a short phone call,” Little explains.

The PVA builds on Little’s previous effort, the Parkinson’s Voice Initiative, which used software Little developed to analyze voice recordings from almost 17,000 volunteers. Over time, the system “learned” to detect differences in voice patterns between people with Parkinson’s disease and healthy people, enabling the technology to diagnose the disease with 98.6 percent accuracy.

These data will then be de-identified and posted to Synapse, Sage’s cloud-based open-source computing environment, where it will form the basis for a computational challenge known as DREAM. The challenge concept, says Stephen Friend, Sage’s president, taps into the “collective ingenuity” of the scientific community to develop “out-of-the-box” solutions by engaging a diverse team of statisticians, machine-learning researchers, computational biologists, and others.

As in previous DREAM Challenges, participating scientists are asked to solve a specific problem—in this case, to develop an algorithm to monitor symptom severity, deteriorating function, and response to treatment in patients with Parkinson’s disease—by placing scientific data, tools, scoreboards, and the resulting predictive models into an open, online forum. The winning team will receive the right to submit a preapproved article about its successful algorithm to a prominent scientific journal.
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articl...e/Say--Aaaah-/

[johnt]

We all accept that Parkinson's is a complex disease with a myriad of symptoms, which vary from person to person. So, at first sight, the answer to Tupelo3's question "Can Parkinson's be Monitored Continuously with a 10-Second Phone Call?" is no.

But, ask a slightly different question "Can Parkinson's be monitored better than a present ..." and, for most of us, the answer is an obvious YES. There's not much of a contest, really, for those of us who see a Parkinson's clinician only once every 6 months: a daily test would have to be very bad to produce less information.

There are a wide range of tests that can be used. Little favours the voice test. As a simple test, I like the side to side tap test, because it correlates well with typing speed. Both of these are invasive, requiring the person to take part in the test. So, I expect that a more convenient way will be found that measures without the involvement of the person. This will allow measurements to be made many times a second. For instance, I'm monitoring variations in the electrical conductivity of the skin and seeing whether this is related to symptoms.

Validating measurement techniques does not need to take years. It is made easier if you realise that the daily ebb and flow of symptoms linked to drug doses creates a vast amount of data in a short time. Such data has an immediate need: as I've mentioned previously, getting the most out of our existing drugs, both collectively and individually, is an attainable objective.

My advice is not to wait until the official measures are released: start now with what is available now.

If anyone wants to collaborate in the competition mentioned, please PM me. We have enough scientists and engineers in this forum to be able to form a competent team, one with a unique insight into the problem.

John