Israel developing application to discover coronavirus by sound of an infected person’s voice
Israel’s defence ministry has offered support to an Israeli start-up called Vocalis Health, which is developing an application with the capacity of diagnosing COVID-19 predicated on the sound of someone’s voice.
Voice samples from virus carriers in a variety of stages of illness and samples from non-infected people are being collected, with the purpose of developing an AI-based algorithm to find COVID-19’s vocal “fingerprint”.
Health professionals will then have the ability to alert users in the first stages of the condition and use the iphone app to monitor its spread across the population.
The response from persons willing to give voice samples has been “overwhelming”, Wenderow said.
In addition to helping curb new infections, the application could also allow patients to be monitored at home, he added.
Israel’s major hospital, the Sheba INFIRMARY monitors patients in mild condition through telemedicine, which allows essential signs to be communicated to staff via sensors connected to a patient’s phone without any dependence on direct contact.
"We used this inside our in-patient treatment -- now when we're shifting from containment to mitigation, we're going to begin using the same technologies to monitor patients in the home," said Professor Eyal Leshem, director of Sheba's centre for travel medicine and tropical diseases.
Sheba also has an innovation and research centre, which is attempting to acquire “all meta-data from COVID-19 patients”.
“As we have more and more data accumulated, we’ll manage to identify markers of serious disease, identify prognostic factors for hospitalised patients at all levels, and potentially utilize this data to identify treatment opportunities,” Leshem said.
