What You Should Know:
– Mayo Clinic announced a collaboration with Vocalis
Health to to research and develop new voice-based tools for screening, detecting
and monitoring patient health, beginning with a study to identify vocal
biomarkers to detect pulmonary hypertension (PH).
– The clinical validation study will utilize Vocalis
Health’s proprietary software, which can operate on any connected voice
platform (mobile, computer, tablet, etc.) to analyze patients’ health based on
voice recordings.
– Following this initial phase, researchers will work to
identify vocal biomarkers targeting additional diseases, symptoms and
conditions.
Mayo Clinic and Vocalis Health, Inc., a company
pioneering AI-based
vocal biomarkers for use in healthcare, today announced a collaboration to
research and develop new voice-based tools for screening, detecting and
monitoring patient health. The collaboration will begin with a study to
identify vocal biomarkers for pulmonary hypertension (PH) which could help
physicians detect and treat PH in their patients.
Impact of Pulmonary Hypertension
Pulmonary hypertension is a severe condition causing high blood pressure in the lungs, but
as the symptoms are similar to other heart and lung conditions, it is often not
detected in routine physical exams. While traditional blood tests can sometimes
detect pulmonary hypertension, it frequently goes undiagnosed. This
strategic collaboration aims to provide an
alternative and highly scalable method to check patients for PH, using only a recording of the patient’s voice, to understand their health and the progression of the disease.
Study Establishes Relationship Between Certain Vocal Biomarkers
& Pulmonary Hypertension
In a previous trial with Vocalis Health, the Mayo research
team established a relationship between certain vocal characteristics and PH.
In this new collaboration, Mayo will conduct a prospective clinical validation
study to further develop PH vocal biomarkers. The clinical validation study
will utilize Vocalis Health’s proprietary software, which can operate on any
connected voice platform (mobile, computer, tablet, etc.) to analyze patients’
health based on voice recordings. Following this initial phase, researchers
will work to identify vocal biomarkers targeting additional diseases, symptoms
and conditions.
Vocalis Health Background
Vocalis Health is an AI healthtech company pioneering the
development of vocal biomarkers – where health-related information is derived
from analysis of people’s voice recordings – to screen, detect, monitor and
predict health symptoms, conditions and diseases. Vocalis Health is currently focused on
screening users for COVID-19 and on monitoring patients with chronic diseases
such as COPD.
“We have seen the clinical benefits of voice analysis for patient screening throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and this collaboration presents an opportunity for us to continue broadening our research, beginning with pulmonary hypertension,” said Tal Wenderow, CEO of Vocalis Health. “Voice analysis has the potential to help physicians make more informed decisions about their patients in a non-invasive, cost-effective manner. We believe this technology could have important clinical implications for telemedicine and remote patient monitoring in the very near future. We are excited to work with Mayo Clinic and have already started planning clinical trials for additional indications.”
