Giving Parkinson's Patients a Voice

Reported January 2010

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Parkinson's disease affects 1.5 million people in the United States. About 90 percent of them have problems with speaking loud enough to be heard. Now a new technology that's helping Parkinson's patients speak up.

Donna Segrist loves chatting it up with friends, but she hasn't always been able to be heard.

"Usually my husband always says, 'Would you say that again please,' when I say something to him," Segrist told Ivanhoe.

She has Parkinson's disease -- a central nervous system disorder that not only impairs her walking and causes tremors. It also affects her ability to speak loudly.

"About two years ago I think I began to feel that my speech was beginning to diminish a bit," Segrist recalled.

Speech scientist Jessica Huber, Ph.D., of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., is helping Parkinson's patients have their voice heard. She invented a device based on a phenomenon called the Lombard effect -- a natural reflex we all have to speak louder in noisy situations.

"If you go into a noisy room, a loud restaurant, you talk louder," Dr. Huber explained. "You don't even think about it, you just do it."

Patients wear an earpiece connected to a device that automatically plays sounds of a restaurant full of people, but without clattering silverware and glasses. A sensor worn on the neck, called an accelerometer, detects when the person starts to speak, telling the device to play the noise through the earpiece and queuing the patient to speak louder.

"What the Parkinson's patients say to me is that they'll say, "Is it on? Is it working? Do I sound different?' And they sound very different," Dr. Huber described.

Patients who tested the device all spoke louder. Segrist uses the device daily, and it's made an impact.

"And now when I have this on, he'll say, 'I heard you,'" Segrist said of her husband.

It's helping her to hear everyone loud and clear.

The device is still being tested. Researchers intend to make the device affordable to patients and will be more widely available within three years.

The Acoustical Society of America contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Jessica E. Huber, PhD
Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN 47906-2038
(765) 494-3796
jhuber@purdue.edu

Acoustical Society of America
Melville, NY 11747-4502
(516) 576-2360
http://asa.aip.org
asa@aip.org

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