Artificial intelligence will diagnose COVID-19 by the sound of a voice

A new startup is collecting voice samples from patients with COVID-19 on the Internet in the hope of finding markers of coronavirus, writes Business Insider.

Photo: Shutterstock

Modern IT technologies enter the fight against coronavirus. So, a team of researchers from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology began to train artificial intelligence to diagnose coronavirus by voice vibrations. A similar startup was also launched in Israel in cooperation with the Ministry of Defense administration for the development of weapons and technological infrastructure.

Experts collected thousands of votes from patients with COVID-19 and healthy people to identify markers indicating changes in the lungs.

Research is in its early stages, but the creators of the project believe that soon the new application will become an additional tool in the fight against a pandemic. Naturally, the application will not replace a full-fledged test, but people who do not have the opportunity to quickly test on COVID-19 will hear recommendations about self-isolation and, perhaps, will not further infect others.

“If we can prove that this works, then when businesses open, this will be an easy tool for them. People will be able to simply speak to the device, and it will alert them if something is wrong,” explained Rita Singh.

A team of researchers from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology uses voice audio data provided by Israeli startup Voca.ai.

Voca.ai co-founder and CTO Alan Becker explained how they managed to obtain this data. Their team created a website on which volunteers left recordings of their voices: 100 of them were infected with coronavirus, and several thousand were completely healthy.

On the subject: You may have been ill with Covid-19 and not known about it: unobvious symptoms of coronavirus infection

To transcribe the recordings, we used tussiphonography technology - this is a diagnostic tool that allows you to determine the presence of respiratory tract diseases by recording the sounds of coughing and wheezing.

The idea of ​​using this method was inspired by researchers from doctors who are convinced that COVID-19 has a unique effect on the breathing of patients, their cough and, as a result, speech.

After registering in the user’s service, they are asked to perform simple actions: cough three times, pronounce the alphabet and hold the vowel sound for as long as possible. The latter allows us to evaluate lung capacity. The data obtained are compared with samples of sounds of people who were definitely infected with a coronavirus. The system is called COVID Voice Detector, its functionality can be found here.

The user’s site is asked to enter demographic data: height, weight, age, symptoms.

The process takes about five minutes, after which, in the first version of the site, the user received a rating of 1 to 10 for signs of Covid-19.

On the subject: From infection to recovery: how the symptoms of COVID-19 change day after day

Although the early research turned out to be impressive, a team of enthusiasts had to face ethical challenges. At the very start, the creators of the project asked the site users to sign an agreement on what they understand: an online test is not a medical diagnosis of coronavirus. Despite this, 48 ​​hours after the launch, Carnegie Mellon University demanded to remove this online test, because the recommendations could be misinterpreted by users, despite the warning in the agreement to use the resource.

“This is a very reasonable request and my team has not thought about this ethical issue,” Rita Singh said. “On the other hand, the COVID pandemic will pass and, we hope, will never return. But if we don't get the data now, we'll never have the information to research!"

“Covid-19 screening using voice recordings is a promising project, especially given how easy it is to collect data while maintaining social distancing. [But] we simply don't have enough information yet to understand the variety of symptoms and changes that occur when a person is infected,” says Satrajit Ghosh, a professor at MIT and Harvard.

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• Scientists called unexpected symptoms of latent coronavirus
• It's all about genes: scientists have figured out why do men get sick more often and die from COVID-19
• Is it possible to treat COVID-19 plasma transfusion and how to get it

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