I came across this interesting TED talk about how a person named Max Little is attempting to make it easy for early detection of Parkinson’s Disease, by allowing people to make a phone call and take a three minute test. The website to go to for this is http://www.parkinsonsvoice.org .

This test aims at collecting about 10,000 samples and then using simple data mining techniques will identify the presence of Parkinson’s Disease and its stage in a person, based on the patterns identified in the samples that are collected.

I took this test and was impressed by the simplicity of the test – simplicity is one of the keys of very successful initiatives.

The test involves saying out your name, then saying a few short sentences and also making some funny sounds such as aaaaaaa, ooooooooooo, eeeeeeeee, etc. 🙂 . The idea here is to capture the vibrations of the vocal chords and see if they show signs of healthy ones or otherwise.

This video is quite thought provoking and made me think about a few ideas related to this:

  1. Currently this test is only available in nine countries (as of 1-Dec-2012) and that makes it quite limiting. This test can actually be enabled to be available directly on the parkinsonsvoice.org website, thus allowing this to be available all over the world via the internet.
  2. This approach is so amazing and simple that the same process can be applied to many other fields in medical sciences and the results can be used to help detect diseases quite early.

Adding this to my Idea Godown 🙂 . Will update here on this topic if I make progress with this one.

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