AI will Soon diagnose illness from Patient’s Voice

We can easily extract someone’s mood from his voice and tone. However, it seems that voice has a lot more to offer these days. New research has revealed that voices can also help diagnose a disease. The National Institute of Health is funding this big research that includes collecting voice data and developing an AI app that can find the illness from Patient’s voice.

The project is part of the NIH’s Bridge to AI program, having more than $100 million in funding from the federal government for creating large-scale health care databases for precision medicine.

Dr. Yael Bensoussan, a laryngologist at the University of South Florida’s Health Voice Center said that patient’s vocal cord vibrations to breathing patterns can offer potential information about health.

“We asked experts: Well, if you close your eyes when a patient comes in, just by listening to their voice, can you have an idea of the diagnosis they have?”. “And that’s where we got all our information.”

Telling how an app will be able to diagnose the disease, it was revealed that someone who speaks slowly might have Parkinson’s disease. A slurring voice is a sign of a stroke. Research revealed that even cancer and depression can also be diagnosed with voice.

Initially, researchers will collect the voices of people from the five areas which are neurological disorders, voice disorders, mood disorders, respiratory disorders, and pediatric disorders like autism and speech delays.

“We were really lacking large what we call open source databases,”  “Every institution kind of has their own database of data. But to create these networks and these infrastructures was really important to then allow researchers from other generations to use this data.”

The main goal behind this app is to serve people living in rural areas by diagnosing their diseases through the app. To achieve this goal, researchers have to start by collecting data, as AI works best if its database is well established.

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