Some diseases are difficult to diagnose, especially before the symptoms become serious. Artificial intelligence can help, sometimes just by listening to you breathe.
Parkinson’s is a debilitating and progressive disease for which there is no known cure. There are treatments that can help, especially if the diagnosis is made early. Researchers at MIT have enlisted the help of artificial intelligence to identify the disease simply by listening to a patient’s breathing patterns while asleep. The system was trained on multiple data sets, including more than 7,000 individuals, and about 10 percent of them had Parkinson’s. The researchers created a device that can track breathing patterns without physical contact with the subject. It looks much like a typical home Internet router, and uses radio signals to monitor the subject’s breathing. Use of a system like this could help identify patients earlier, so that they could receive treatment sooner and hopefully slow the progression of the disease.