Covid-19: New app can detect virus in your voice with high accuracy

A group of scientists has developed a mobile phone app that can detect Covid-19 in people’s voice. The researchers say thanks to artificial intelligence, the app can determine the presence of the virus through a person’s voice with 89% accuracy. It is a cheaper and easier alternative to PCR tests which are unaffordable to many people especially in developing countries, Sky News reports.

MyCOPD voice test

Infection normally impacts the upper respiratory tract and the vocal cords and so researchers decided to analyse changes in voices using an AI model to detect Covid-19. The myCOPD app asks users to cough, breathe deeply then read a short sentence three times.

In tests, it correctly identified positive cases 89 per cent of the time and negative cases 83 per cent in less than a minute, according to Evening Standard. Researcher Wafaa Aljbawi, from the University of Maastricht, in the Netherlands, said:

These promising results suggest that simple voice recordings and fine-tuned AI algorithms can potentially achieve high precision in determining which patients have Covid-19 infection. Such tests can be provided at no cost and are simple to interpret. Moreover, they enable remote, virtual testing and have a turnaround time of less than a minute.

‘Significant improvement’

Results can be provided in less than a minute and are said to be a ‘significant improvement’ on the accuracy of lateral flow tests. Aljbawi said lateral flow tests missed 44 out of 100 positive cases, while the app would miss just 11. But the app may wrongly diagnose 17 in 100 non-infected people, compared with one in 100 for lateral flow.

These results show a significant improvement in the accuracy of diagnosing Covid-19 compared to state-of-the-art tests such as the lateral flow test.

The app uses 893 audio samples from 4,352 participants including 308 Covid patients; data from Cambridge University.

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