Researchers announced on Monday that a smartphone app can accurately identify Covid-19 infection in people’s voices using artificial intelligence (AI). The software can be utilised in low-income nations where PCR tests are expensive and/or challenging to deliver because, according to the team, it is cheaper, quicker, and easier to use than numerous antigen testing.
“The promising results suggest that voice recordings and fine-tuned AI algorithms can potentially achieve high precision in determining which patients have Covid-19 infection,” said a researcher, Wafaa Aljbawi, of the Institute of Data Science, Maastricht University, The Netherlands.
“Moreover, they enable remote, virtual testing and also have a turnaround time of less than a minute. They could be used, for example, at entry points for large gatherings, enabling rapid screening of the population,” she said at the European Respiratory Society International Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
The upper respiratory tract and vocal cords are typically infected by the covid-19 infection, changing a person’s voice. Aljbawi and her superiors made the decision to look into the viability of using AI to analyse voices in order to identify Covid-19. They used information from the crowdsourced Covid-19 Sounds App from the University of Cambridge, which includes 893 audio samples from 4,352 healthy and unhealthy subjects, of whom 308 had tested positive for Covid-19.
The researchers employed a method for analysing voice known as Mel-spectrogram analysis, which distinguishes several voice characteristics like loudness, power, and fluctuation across time.
Its overall ability to detect positive cases was 89 per cent, and its ability to identify negative cases was 83 per cent.
