Sound Sick? New AI Technology Might Tell If It's COVID
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You think you might have COVID. You speak a couple of sentences into your phone. Then an app gives you reliable results in under a minute. "You sound sick" is what we humans might tell a friend. Artificial intelligence, or AI, could take that to new frontiers by analyzing your voice to detect a COVID infection. An inexpensive and simple app could be used in low-income countries or to screen crowds at concerts and other large gatherings
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@patralekha Over the past decade, AI speech analysis has been shown to help detect Parkinson's disease, posttraumatic stress disorder, dementia, and heart disease. Research has been so promising that the National Institutes of Health just launched a new initiative to develop AI to use voice to diagnose a wide array of conditions. These range from such respiratory maladies as pneumonia and COPD to laryngeal cancer and even stroke, ALS, and psychiatric disorders like depression and schizophrenia. Software can detect nuances that the human ear can't. At least half a dozen studies have taken this approach to COVID detection. In the most recent advancement, researchers from Maastricht University in the Netherlands are reporting their AI model was accurate 89% of the time, compared with an average of 56% for various lateral flow tests. The voice test also was more accurate at detecting infection in people not showing symptoms.