Abstract:

Observation is a fundamental part of the practice of clinical medicine. Observation of movement is particularly important for the neurologist. Conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, stroke, epilepsy, and many others affect a person’s movement in characteristic ways. In some conditions, changes in the patient’s voice can be included in this – changes in sound caused by changes in the movements of speech. The clinician’s detection of a characteristic abnormality, and their judgment of its severity, plays a central role in both diagnosis and the assessment of prognosis or response to treatment. However, that practice depends upon a limited resource of experienced experts. In addition, these experts are limited by human visual judgment, which cannot reliably or precisely detect and measure small or subtle changes in movement (Williams et al., 2023).