Bellevue teen builds app to monitor Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and ALS
A new technology aims to put healthcare into patients' and families' hands - and it was created by a 16-year-old in Bellevue.
On top of sports, International Baccalaureate classes, science fairs and school clubs, Ilina Rao has spent the past year preparing for Technovation Girls, a global innovation challenge, where students develop apps to address real-world problems.
Rao, a junior at Interlake High School in Bellevue, was in June named a semifinalist out of roughly 33,000 competitors from 160 countries. Finalists were announced last week, and while Rao didn't advance, she was glad the competition gave her the opportunity to share her work.
Rao knew she wanted to create something that could make an impact and got the idea to start building NeuroSpeak, an app that uses artificial intelligence to help users detect early signs of Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
The free app "listens to someone's voice and looks for patterns that sometimes show up years before someone is actually diagnosed with something like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or ALS," she said.
However, she wants to be clear. NeuroSpeak should not be used to diagnose people.
"It's a screening tool," she said. "Not a diagnostic tool."
The app is not yet publicly available, though Rao is continuing work on it.
Rao had learned about Technovation Girls from friends who previously participated. Through the competition, students around the world vie for educational stipends and the chance to present their projects at the World Summit which will take place this fall in Bengaluru, India.
Rao has been working on the app since last summer. She said she wanted the technology to help patients and families, not just medical professionals.
"I noticed that a lot of tools using AI for healthcare were built for hospitals or specialists and not for, you know, families or those who really need the answers the most," she said. "For instance, people in rural areas or people without insurance or people who can't easily get to a neurologist."
NeuroSpeak also aims to break barriers to access by letting users screen for symptoms free of charge, she noted.
"I wanted to build something that put that kind of early detection technology directly into someone's hands for free," she said.
The concept is simple. Users record 30-second speech samples each day, and AI logs screening results, which can be used to identify patterns indicative of Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's or ALS.
An in-app symptom journal also allows users to keep track of their experiences.
"I used the AI approach for those three different diseases because they were all neurodegenerative diseases that had speech signals that are able to be targeted," Rao said.
Humans, including medical professionals, have difficulty telling which speech patterns correlate with which neurodegenerative conditions, Rao said, but NeuroSpeak aims to more efficiently identify and differentiate between indicators for each condition.
Through Technovation Girls, competitors typically partner with a mentor and work in groups of up to five people, but Rao chose to work alone. She worked almost every single day for months to develop and present the app, she said.
She advanced through several rounds of judging, competing against teams around the world. Rao says the competition has showed her how she can make an impact.
"It's given me a lot of confidence, being chosen to be a semifinalist, that I can make an impact and that my efforts mean something and that I was able to help people," she said.
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