Parkinson's Disease Paid Clinical Trials in Illinois

The goal of the Speech Accessibility Project at the University of Illinois Beckman Institute (https://speechaccessibilityproject.beckman.illinois.edu) is to collect, annotate, and curate a shared database of speech samples from people with atypical speech, and share this data set with researchers at other organizations. This two-year project plans to collect 1,200,000 speech samples from 2,000 people, each of whom will provide 600 samples. In Year 1, the initial focus will be people with Parkinson's. In Year 2, four more etiologies of interest will be recruited: Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), Cerebral Palsy (CP), Down Syndrome (DS), and Stroke. UIUC will build an open-source software infrastructure to collect annotated speech samples and share these data in an appropriately secure fashion with researchers from our partner technology companies (and eventually, other organizations as well) so that they can use these data to improve their automatic speech recognition algorithms. This project promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion by helping technology companies to fully support all types of speech, and it is also more efficient and less burdensome for these specialized patient populations to have one centralized "collector" of speech samples. Read Less