Stony Brook University Professors Lisa Muratori and Margaret Schedel collaborated on a project that was recently profiled in Wired — Our Ears Are Unlocking an Era of Aural Data.

Muratori, an associate professor of physical therapy from the School of Health Technology and Management, works with patients that suffer from neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, which may affect their strides. Her solution for helping them determine when their gate is off? She put sensors in their shoes to create a data stream, but the problem was how to translate that information to her patients.

That’s when she turned to Schedel, an associate professor in the Department of Music, and the they collaborated on a software that alerts patients to changes in their stride by distorting the sound of whatever they are listening to on their earbuds.

As stated in the article, “It’s an example of an intriguing new evolution in our big-data world: sonification, expressing data through sound.”

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