Max Little is a mathematician whose research includes a breakthrough technique to monitor – and potentially screen for – Parkinson's disease through simple voice recordings.
Why you should listen
Max Little is an applied mathematician whose goal is to "see connections between subjects, not boundaries … to see how things are related, not how they are different." He has a background in applied mathematics, statistics, signal processing and computational engineering, and his work has been applied across disciplines like biomedicine, extreme rainfall analysis and forecasting, biophysical signal processing, and hydrogeomorphology and open channel flow measurement. Little is best known for his work on the Parkinson's Voice Initiative, in which he and his team developed a cheap and simple tool that uses precise voice analysis software to detect Parkinson's with 99 percent accuracy. Little is a TEDGlobal 2012 Fellow and a Wellcome Trust-MIT Postdoctoral Research Fellow.
Max Little’s TED Talk
More news and ideas from Max Little
Fellows Friday
mPowering the Apple ResearchKit: How Max Little put a Parkinson’s app on the iPhone
March 13, 2015
This week, Apple turned the iPhone into a medical research tool with the launch of ResearchKit. This open-source framework, described in the video above, lets a medical researcher set up a project to gather anonymous patient data on diseases like asthma, breast cancer and diabetes. Using their own smartphones, patients who join a project can […]
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The voice detective: Fellows Friday with Max Little, whose Parkinson’s Voice Initiative took off after his TED Talk
December 21, 2012
At TEDGlobal 2012, Max Little (watch his TED Talk) asked the public to contribute voice samples to the Parkinson’s Voice Initiative, a data-gathering project that aims to help develop a way to diagnose the neurological disease quickly, non-invasively and in its early stages. If it succeeds, it could change the quality of care for Parkinson’s […]
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In Short: Parkinson’s Voice Initiative reaches 10K calls, as a restaurant asks you to check your phone
August 17, 2012
Max Little, who gave the recent talk “A test for Parkinson’s with a phone call,” let us know that the Parkinson’s Voice Initiative has reached its goal of collecting 10,000 voice samples — which they needed to ensure the accuracy of their over-the-phone test for the disease. “It’s probably the fastest ever, large-scale Parkinson’s study,” […]
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