by Chua Wei Ling
We’ve all heard the phrase “Music is my medicine”, but what if, music can really be a medicine? A new project, called The Sync Project by a company based in Boston, is hoping to figure out how music can be used as medicine as technologies are now advanced enough to allow for greater research.
With music mobile apps taking a shot by predicting what users might be interested in listening to, the concept behind The Sync Project is similar in the sense that they hope to track how different music tracks might cause the body to react accordingly, and from the data gathered, decide the type of music most suitable for tasks such as falling asleep faster, focusing on a task better or even exercise better. The data will be collected from users using fitness bands such as FitBit which gathers biometric data such as heart rate, number of steps taken etc, as well as through apps which users concurrently are listening to music from, and thus from there, tabulate data to best fit the activities. The project is currently only opened to a small group of researchers and scientists, although there are hopes to open it to more users to aid in the research in future.
In addition to that, one medical condition that music can help is Parkinson’s disease, as patients do respond to a song’s rhythm. Depending on the beat, patients have made improvements in their walking, although much more research has to be made in order to understand the effects of music better.
If you are interested to read more, you can do so here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/05/can-music-be-used-as-medicine/391820/
