Voice could be a way to detect disease.Researchers are building a database of human voices that they’ll use to develop AI-based tools that could eventually diagnose serious diseases; they’re targeting everything from Alzheimer’s to cancer. The National Institutes of Health-funded project, announced Tuesday, is an effort to turn the human voice into something that could be used as a biomarker for disease, like blood or temperature.
The research team will start by building an app that will collect voice data from participants with conditions like vocal fold paralysis, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, depression, pneumonia, and autism. All the voice collections will be supervised by a clinician. “So for example, somebody that has Parkinson’s disease — their voice can be lower and the way they talk is slower,” Bensoussan says. They would be asked to say sounds, read sentences, and read full texts through the app.
Then, they’ll use the datasets to build AI models that could detect the various conditions. The research team is collaborating with the medical AI company Owkin to build and train the AI models in the project.lets the patient data stay housed at the healthcare center where it was collected — the AI model travels between institutions. The model learns separately on each dataset, and then the results of those trainings come back to a central location, where they’re amalgamated together.