Remote Assessment of Parkinson’s Disease Symptom Severity Using the Simulated Cellular Mobile Telephone Network

Telemonitoring of Parkinson's Disease (PD) has attracted considerable research interest because its potential to make a lasting, positive impact on the life patients and their carers. Purpose-built devices have been developed that record various signals which can be associated with average PD symptom severity, as quantified standard clinical metrics such Unified Rating Scale (UPDRS). Speech are particularly promising in this regard, they easily recorded without use expensive, dedicated hardware. Previous studies demonstrated replication UPDRS within less than 2 points raters' assessment using high-quality speech collected telemonitoring Here, we investigate voice-over-GSM (2G) or UMTS (3G) cellular mobile telephone networks for telemonitoring, that, together, greater 5 billion subscribers worldwide. We test robustness approach simulated noisy communication network over transmitted, approximately 6000 recordings from 42 subjects. show estimated 3.5 difference assessment, is clinically useful given inter-rater variability high 4-5 points. This provides compelling evidence existing voice towards facilitating inexpensive, mass-scale applications.