At the age of 17, while watching a video of Michael J. Fox, Erin Smith noticed something that she couldn’t get off her mind. “Whenever a Parkinson’s patient would laugh or smile, it came off as really emotionally distant,” she says. With this in mind she contacted clinicians and caregivers and found they’d noticed similar facial expressions in some of their patients often years before these patents were officially diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Erin Smith set to work on developing a diagnosis system that uses AI to view changes in facial expressions over time to detect disorders like Parkinson’s. Parkinson’s is a difficult disorder to detect and diagnose but Erin’s new system, which she named FacePrint, has an 88 percent accuracy rate. Erin is receiving support and funding from pharmaceutical companies as well as from the Michael J. Fox Foundation. As one of twenty young innovators selected for the Thiel Fellowship, Erin will be on leave from her university studies while she completes research and her technology undergoes clinical trial at Stanford University, where she is enrolled.
Erin Smith has also done her own TEDx talk which can be watched here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pS3UftoWpo&t=124s
Erin Smith’s research and innovation is very impressive and inspirational, she saw a possibility to create something that would help people and instantly got to work.
Personally I think this is super cool, diagnosing various medical conditions can be incredibly difficult, so finding a new way to test, especially in a way that is hard to quantify with numbers is really really neat!
This is really interesting since there are so many various forms of looking for medical conditions that may not be as effective. I think this could be a new way of predicting medical condition diagnosis in advance in a much simpler way.
I think this idea for a biasness is very cool and innovative. The medical industry is always in need of advancements and is a great place for entrepreneurs to look for opportunities to start a business