How devices the size of bluetooth pieces are giving patients back their voice

Parkinson's disease is a degenerative disorder in which symptoms including difficulty with walking and gait, slowness of movement, shaking, impairments to speech and cognition, and depression worsen as the disease progresses. The National Parkinson Foundation reports that in the United States alone, 50,000-60,000 new cases of Parkinson's disease are diagnosed each year, adding to the one million people who are currently diagnosed. Perhaps most startling is that complications for Parkinson's disease are the 14th leading cause of death in the United States. Despite the challenges inherent with Parkinson's disease, there is hope. As researchers and practitioners work towards specialized treatments to better care for patients with Parkinson's disease, they are greatly impacting both the patient's lives and their families.

 Dr. Jessica Huber, of Purdue University, is a speech language pathologist and researcher who focuses on the quality of life for her patients before collecting her research results. As a young scientist, she chose to begin looking at Parkinson's disease because it provided a nice disease model. After a short while however, Dr. Huber realized that her subjects were more than models to understand disease. She passionately describes patients who have been married for 40 years that could no longer communicate. While one partner with Parkinson's was having difficulty speaking, because of the disease process, their spouse often had hearing loss, as a result of the aging process. Dr. Huber understood that if she could restore patient's speech, she would be able to bring back to life the gift of companionship for couples who had been affected by the disease process. This empathy sparked a love for her patients that changed her research agenda as she now studies how to make their lives better by developing and testing effectiveness of treatments to improve communication, cognition, mobility, and quality of life.

Current research projects include:

  • Dr. Huber works to develop treatments that can be implemented within the patient's home or everyday activities rather than in a therapy room. Therapies which can be practiced at home or in daily life will ultimately reduce health-care costs and would help mitigate issues with insurance coverage, decreasing the need for further medical treatment.

  • Dr. Huber invented a device, called the SpeechVive, which recently hit the market (www.speechvive.com). SpeechVive was developed in response to the difficulties patients with Parkinson's disease often have with speaking loudly and clearly enough to be understood. SpeechVive is a small device that looks similar to a bluetooth device. The device plays noise in one of the wearer's ears while he or she is talking. The noise elicits an automatic reflex to talk louder, at a more normal rate, and with improved clarity. The device can be worn throughout the day so that people with Parkinson's disease can obtain better communication effectiveness in their everyday lives. Their first study of 39 people with Parkinson's disease demonstrated that 90% of the participants improved loudness, rate, and/or speech clarity after wearing the device for eight weeks.

  • Studies have continued to better understand ways in which SpeechVive can impact patients. Specifically, Dr. Huber is interested in patients with severe Parkinsonian syndromes and patients that have had deep-brain stimulation surgery. These patient populations historically do not respond as well to traditional speech therapy. Dr. Huber believes SpeechVive may allow these patients to make large strides in their abilities to better communicate. She would also like to hone our understanding of who the best candidates for SpeechVive might be and how we can couple the SpeechVive with other therapies.

  • Dr. Huber's research is deeply collaborative as she believes working with a holistic team has helped her team to "focus on the individual patients instead of one little part of the person." She and collaborators are presently examining the effectiveness of training paradigms for improving balance and walking in older adults and people with Parkinson's disease. They have developed a new computerized balance training program and are starting to test its efficacy, as compared to more traditional physical therapy paradigms. They are also transitioning this program to be used with the Microsoft Kinect. In addition, her work with a sports psychology researcher is examining how therapeutic training impacts self-confidence, depression, and quality of life.

  • Dr. Huber studies patients that have had deep-brain stimulation in order to better understand how the multiple types of Parkinson's disease respond to this treatment in order to better predict outcomes for individual patients.

     Dr. Huber's passion for her patients and the resulting research have created opportunities for patients with Parkinson's disease to improve their quality of life. Not only have patients been affected by her treatments, but family members of patients are enlivened to be able to understand and communicate with their loved ones once again. The impact of her research therefore has the potential to extend beyond a laboratory and scientific exploration and into the homes of the 50,000-60,000 new families affected by Parkinson's disease each year. 

Jessica Huber received her Ph.D. in Speech Science from the University at Buffalo - State University of New York in June, 2001. She joined the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at Purdue University in fall, 2001. Professor Huber was trained in the collection and analysis of physiologic data from the speech subsystems (respiratory, laryngeal, and articulatory). Specifically, she uses movement, airflow, air pressure, and acoustic analyses to describe how these subsystems function in speech.

Professor Huber's primary area of research is speech motor control in both healthy individuals and individuals with motor speech disorders, in particular Parkinson's disease. She is also interested in how individuals maintain balance in the face of other daily tasks, in particular communicating. Current research projects include studies of the effects of speech treatments, dopaminergic drugs, and deep-brain stimulation on speech in Parkinson's disease, the effects of aging on speech and prosody, and the effects of aging and Parkinson's disease on multi-tasking (walking or reaching while communicating).

Website: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~jhuber/MainContent/home.html

Patents:

PCT/US2012/26033 Method and System for Training Voice Patterns, priority date February 2010

US 13/398339 Method and Apparatus for Increasing Voice Loudness, priority date August 2009

Patent pending for SpeechVive.