Jana Špičková has been treated for multiple sclerosis for 25 years. She has now come for a regular check-up at the MS Center in the Faculty Polyclinic on Charles Square in Prague. She is one of the first twenty patients involved in the new study.
Michal Novotný from the Czech Technical University of Electrical Engineering introduces her to the application that she will use to record her speech. “PA TA KA is a task that is supposed to reflect how the patient moves their lips and tongue.”
The study participants also send several phone calls to the scientists via a secure server every month. “The entire analysis is then carried out automatically. Given the volume of data that we record, it is not humanly possible for someone to sit and listen to what everyone is saying, to see if there is any sensitive information there,” explains Novotný.
“I want to contribute to the advancement of science and to help people who will be diagnosed after me,” explains Jana, explaining why she joined the study.
What the human ear cannot detect
For some tasks, scientists also record facial expressions, for example when reading text. Experts want to involve up to 300 patients in the study. At the same time, they are looking for healthy volunteers, mainly women aged 30 to 70, to verify that the monitored markers are not related to age, for example, but directly to the disease.
As Tomáš Uher from the Department of Neurology of the General University Hospital points out, speech disorders in multiple sclerosis are more typical of the later stages of the disease. "We want to discover whether patients do not experience minor changes in speech that we cannot detect with normal hearing, but we can technically record them. And also whether these changes can help us better monitor the activity of the disease," he explains.
A similar application was already created by a team from CTU for patients with Parkinson's disease. The scientists are now analyzing the data from this research. “With Parkinson’s disease, we are mainly concerned with detecting the disease at the earliest possible stage, ideally before the diagnosis is made. With multiple sclerosis, on the contrary, it is about monitoring the disease after the diagnosis and following its development,” adds Michal Novotný.
More precise monitoring
Doctors today decide on the treatment of patients based on the findings of magnetic resonance imaging, blood tests and neurological examinations. “For many years, we have been looking for various tools that would describe the patient’s neurological condition in more detail than the neurological examination itself,” says Eva Kubala-Havrdová, head of the Center for Highly Specialized Care for Multiple Sclerosis at the General University Hospital.
“Speech analysis is one of the tools with which we could assess the development of the disease. It would provide us with data that would allow us to know in time whether there is a need to change the treatment. We are not very good at recognizing gradual progression independent of attacks today. If we had succeeded earlier, we might have been able to intervene,” she adds.
Scientists will collect data from the research application for two years.