Company
Date Published
Author
Erika Balbuena
Word count
631
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The Parkinson’s Voice Initiative is a non-profit organization that uses Twilio's communications technology to help diagnose and treat Parkinson's disease through the analysis of human voice recordings. The initiative was founded by Dr. Max Little, who discovered that voice disorders can be key indicators of Parkinson's disease. With the help of Twilio, the PVI system compares voice samples of Parkinson's sufferers to healthy individuals and analyzes the difference between the two, identifying abnormal vocal fluctuations associated with the disease. Participants in the study simply need to make a phone call using any cell phone or VoIP client to provide their voice data, which is then analyzed by the platform. The initiative has already recorded 17,000 voices in under six months and is working to improve medical research and treatment for Parkinson's disease.