This new technology that’s just being tested nowadays will blow your mind. It uses a software to detect through your voice whether you have COVID-19 or not. Doesn’t that sound amazing and awfully convenient? Read all about it here with us:
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What’s Going On?
Researchers announced on Monday that a smartphone app can accurately identify COVID-19 infection in people’s voices using artificial intelligence (AI). Basically, the software can be utilised in low-income nations where PCR tests are expensive. The other issue can be the challenges to deliver the tests. This is because the app is cheaper, quicker, and easier to use than numerous antigen testing. However, how many people have access to phones and thus, apps in such nations?
Wafaa Aljbawi is a researcher at the Institute of Data Science at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. She said, “The encouraging results suggest that simple voice recordings and fine-tuned AI algorithms can potentially achieve high precision in determining which patients have COVID-19 infection.” The app also supports virtual, remote testing and has a turnaround time of under a minute. The app could be used for instance, at the entrances to huge gatherings to enable quick population screening.
Why Does It Work?
The science behind it is that the COVID-19 infection typically impacts the upper respiratory tract and vocal cords. They change a person’s voice. Aljbawi and her superiors made the decision to look into the viability of using AI to analyze voices in order to identify COVID-19. It’s the day and age of technology and this is how it is used for everybody’s benefit!
They used information from the crowd-sourced COVID-19 Sounds App from the University of Cambridge. It includes 893 audio samples from 4,352 healthy and unhealthy subjects, of whom 308 had tested positive for COVID-19. The researchers then used a method for analysing voice known as Mel-spectrogram analysis. This distinguishes several voice characteristics like loudness, power, and fluctuation across time. As a result, COVID-19 can be detected through the changes in these factors of sound.
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The Feasibility
If this were to become a thing, it could not only make testing easier but also control the spread of the virus. Would you download the app?
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