As medicine turns away from treatment and towards prevention, diagnostic tools have become a focus for researchers. The earlier disease can be detected, the sooner providers can implement interventions that may change the course of the disease or delay its onset. The easier and more cost-effective these tools are, the more people can be tested.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers are focused on developing a tool that would help diagnose Parkinson’s early on. The method they've devised is incredibly easy to implement on a wide-scale using electronics with which we already interact daily.
Researchers have found a way to pull data from the ways that we interact with a standard keyboard in order to identify the beginning stages of Parkinson’s disease. In the future, this may help doctors catch the disease very early on, with slightly more than just a quick typing test, which may even be done remotely.
In the above video from MIT, Ian Butterworth and Luca Giancarlo discuss the diagnostic method called keystroke analysis.
Sources: MIT News
