IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering (submitted) [2013] (A.Tsanas, M.A.Little, P.E.McSharry, L.O. Ramig)
Dysphonia is an impairment in the ability to produce vocal
sounds that can occur in Parkinson's Disease. A wide range of dysphonia measures
have been used to predict Parkinson's Disease severity using speech signals.
Researchers demonstrated that this method can match standard methods of
diagnosing Parkinson's Disease.
Telephone monitoring of Parkinson’s Disease has attracted
interest as a potential means of assessing this. Purpose built devices have been
developed that record various signals that can be associated with symptom
severity, as quantified on standard Parkinson's Disease scores such as the
Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS). Previous studies have
demonstrated replication of UPDRS scores to within less than 2 points of a
clinical raters’ assessment of symptom severity, using solely high-quality
speech signals.
This study investigated using the cellular mobile telephone
networks for Parkinson's Disease monitoring. The Parkinson's Disease (UPDRS)
symptom score could be estimated to within about 3.5 points difference from the
clinicians’ assessment, which is useful because even different clinicians vary
by as much as 4 to 5 points. This provides evidence that the phone network is
adequate for inexpensive, mass-scale Parkinson's Disease symptom
monitoring.
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