CAMBRIDGE, Mass.: PatientsLikeMe and Sage Bionetworks Launch Open Science Study for People with Parkinson’s Disease | Business Press Releases | Fort Mill Times

"PatientsLikeMe and the nonprofit research organization Sage Bionetworks announced today the launch of a new crowdsourced study to develop voice analysis tools that both researchers and people with Parkinson’s disease (PD) can use to track PD disease progression. In collaboration with TED Fellow Dr. Max Little, the Patient Voice Analysis (PVA) project will for the first time combine data from two sources: phone-based voice recordings that Dr. Little’s software collects and analyzes to detect markers of PD; and information reported by patients using PatientsLikeMe’s Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (PDRS), a tool that documents patients’ answers to questions that measure treatment effectiveness and disease progression. Both sets of data will be analyzed by the PVA team composed of Dr. Little and scientists from PatientsLikeMe and Sage Bionetworks. In later phases of the project, the de-identified data sets will be available to the broader research community on Sage Bionetworks’ cloud-based computational research platform (www.synapse.org). By crowdsourcing the analysis, the PVA team hopes to identify relationships between voice markers (like tremors in speech) and clinical signs of Parkinson’s disease (such as tremors in the body) so that it becomes possible to monitor patients’ progression with a short phone call. Current monitoring efforts for PD typically require patients to undergo multiple lab visits that cost both time and money ..."