Researchers and medical professionals have noticed in the last years how useful voice-based solutions can prove to be in healthcare – both in diagnostics as well as in supporting their daily tasks, such as administration.
Scientists found that characteristics of patients’ voices – or as medicine labels them, vocal biomarkers – reveal a lot about their health; and help in detecting serious diseases and health risks. For example, an Israeli company, Beyond Verbal deals with emotion analytics and provides voice analysis software. It has announced that its algorithms were successful in helping to detect the presence of coronary artery disease (CAD) in a group of patients. Another initiative, Sonde Health Inc., a Boston-based company develops a voice-based technology platform for monitoring and diagnosing mental and physical medical conditions, but we expect a lot more solutions to come in the future.
The same is true for the use of voice-based technologies for supporting medical professionals in their gargantuan fight against administration. Artificial intelligence-based voice to text technologies promise to turn the tables on the necessity of bureaucracy in the doctors’ office: the physician and the patient could speak while a voice assistant listens in and puts down the interpreted text into the relevant columns in the EHRs. That’s what we expect to happen in the future.