Exploring Federated Learning for Speech-based Parkinson's Disease Detection

Parkinson's Disease is the second most prevalent neurodegenera-tive disorder, currently affecting as high as 3% of the global popula-tion. Research suggests that up to 80% of patients manifest phona-tory symptoms as early signs of the disease. In this respect, various systems have been developed that identify high risk patients by analyzing their speech using recordings obtained from natural dia-logues and reading tasks conducted in clinical settings. However, most of them are centralized models, where training and inference take place on a single machine, raising concerns about data privacy and scalability. To address these issues, the current study migrates an existing, state- of-the-art centralized approach to the concept of federated learning, where the model is trained in multiple inde-pendent sessions on different machines, each with its own dataset. Therefore, the main objective is to establish a proof of concept for federated learning in this domain, demonstrating its effectiveness and viability. Moreover, the study aims to overcome challenges asso-ciated with centralized machine learning models while promoting collaborative and privacy-preserving model training.