A new app claims it can detect Covid-19 in your voice.
According to the app creators it detects the virus by listening to your voice for one minute. It is said to be "more accurate than lateral flow tests."
The scientific breakthrough is powered by artificial intelligence and gives an accurate positive result 89% of the time and 83% of the time for negative cases. The Mirror reported that it delivers its answer in under a minute compared to the unwieldy LFTs where accuracy reportedly varied depending on brand.
READ MORE: Long covid: What is it, different types, symptoms and how to keep safe
The app could revolutionise the approach to testing for covid especially in poorer countries where the gold-standard PCR tests are expensive and often difficult to distribute. In the UK, it could help keep the virus at bay in the long-term after the government decided to scrap free LFTs.
The Dutch creators behind the new app explained how it works. They said that covid usually affects the upper respiratory tract and vocal chords of a person, leading to subtle changes in their voice.
The team investigated whether using this to detect the novel virus was possible. During development, they used data from the University of Cambridge’s crowdsourcing Covid-19 Sounds App.
This contained 893 audio samples from 4,352 participants, 308 of whom had tested positive for the virus. The app would take some basic information on participants including demographics, medical history and smoking status.
It would then ask them to record some respiratory sounds which include coughing three times, breathing deeply through their mouth and reading a short sentence three times. Then a voice analysis technique called Mel-spectrogram analysis was used which identifies different key features in the voice - including loudness, power and variation over time.
Then, an AI-based on human neural networks was used to work with this to detect the deadly virus. Researcher Wafaa Aljbawi, from the University of Maastricht, 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.
“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 lateral flow test has a sensitivity of only 56%, but a higher specificity rate of 99.5%.
“In other words, we could miss 11 out 100 cases who would go on to spread the infection, while the lateral flow test would miss 44 out of 100 cases. The high specificity of the lateral flow test means that only one in 100 people would be wrongly told they were Covid-19 positive when, in fact, they were not infected, while the LSTM test would wrongly diagnose 17 in 100 non-infected people as positive. However, since this test is virtually free, it is possible to invite people for PCR tests if the LSTM tests show they are positive.”
Before the app can begin to appear on phones everywhere the team say they need more participants. Since the start of the project 53,449 audio samples from 36,116 participants have now been collected and can be used to improve and validate the accuracy of the model. The findings will be presented at the European Respiratory Society International Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
Receive newsletters with the latest news, sport and what's on updates from the Liverpool ECHO by signing up here
READ MORE:
This Morning's Vernon Kay red-faced after Rochelle Humes' rude remark
Three sleep symptoms you may need to see a doctor for
Gogglebox's Scarlett Moffatt in tears as man tries to 'take her home'
Warning issued to anyone who rents a home in the UK
BBC Antiques Roadshow guest told £250k item is actually worth £150
