When music, information technology, and medicine meet

Abstract

From Napster to YouTube and iTunes, music has always been a major driving force of Internet technologies. A huge amount of music content is now accessible to the public. Organizing and categorizing this content to support an effective recommendation system has become a significant challenge. The primary goal of our lab is to develop new technologies to address this challenge in the field of healthcare. We seek to harness the synergy of sound and music computing (SMC), mobile computing, and cloud computing technologies to promote healthy lifestyles and to facilitate disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment in both developed countries and resource-poor developing countries. In this talk, I present a collaborative research project between the SMC lab at National University of Singapore and the Music, Neuroimaging, and Stroke Recovery Lab at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) / Harvard Medical School. We are developing a cloud-based therapy delivery system that uses music to enhance limb function and speech in patients with neurological impairments using smart devices such as iPhone. Our focus is to develop high-tech, low-cost solutions that aim to (1) facilitate recovery in patients with post-stroke speech and motor impairments, (2) improve gait and mobility and reduce fall risk in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), and thereby, improve Quality of Life (QoL) for both patients and caregivers.