COVID 19 Can be Detected Through Your Voice, Claims Vocalis Health
An Israel based company named Vocalis Health claims that it has developed a new software that can analyse a person’s voice and use that to detect if they have COVID 19 or not. According to them, vocal biomarkers from people’s recorded voices can be used to screen, detect, monitor and predict health symptoms, conditions and diseases. Recently, the company carried out a study in Mumbai to test its software named VocalisCheck which nearly covered 2,000 participants who spoke in multiple languages including English, Hindi, Marathi, and Gujarati. The company said that results from an unblinded validation set of 288 participants demonstrated an AUC of 0.88, which translated to accuracy of 81.2 percent, sensitivity of 80.3 percent and specificity of 81.4 percent.
VocalisCheck is a software-only product that can be accessed through smartphones or other devices in which users have to simply count from 50 to 70, and their voice recording will be transformed to a picture (spectrogram) containing 512 features. The picture will then be compared using AI machine learning/ deep learning techniques to a composite picture based upon the voice recordings of COVID-19 positive participants in clinical trials to determine whether there is a high or low connection between them. This technology can be put into existing mobile or web applications (via an SDK or Software Developers Kit) or can be accessed through a resolute web-based portal.
Though , the results have not been verified by anyone else yet. The company though mentions that VocalisCheck is not planned to work as a diagnostic tool, but preferably to be used for screening and identifying people who need additional diagnostic testing, in order to allocate diagnostic resources more efficiently.
The CEO of Vocalis Health Tal Wenderow quoted, “We are encouraged by the study’s findings, which further validate VocalisCheck’s ability to screen for COVID-19, “These new results, combined with our recent CE-mark approval, demonstrate our commercial readiness to deploy the VocalisCheck screening tool to help businesses, governments, universities and others safely return to work, school, healthcare and leisure while lightening the burden on health systems.”