Type II diabetes can be recognized by a person's voice
The authors of a new study suggest that type II diabetes causes a person's voice to change in a subtle but consistent way.To find out if a patient has type II diabetes, they have to take a blood test and then wait for the results. However, a 10-second voice recording on a smartphone could replace this test, according to a recent study
Researchers from international biotechnology company Klick Lab conducted a study involving 267 people who had already been diagnosed with diabetes (192 people) or type II diabetes (75 people).
Each person was asked to record a certain spoken phrase on a smartphone via a special app up to six times a day for two weeks. Depending on the speed at which each subject spoke, these recordings lasted between six and 10 seconds.
When the scientists analyzed 14 acoustic characteristics from the 18,465 recordings they received, they found that some of them, such as pitch and intensity, were consistently different between participants without and diagnosed with diabetes. Although humans do not recognize these differences, they can be picked up by signal processing software.
The new discovery suggests that the development of type II diabetes causes slight changes in a person's voice.
With this theory in mind, scientists created an artificial intelligence-based program that analyzes voice recordings along with patient information such as age, gender, height and weight. The app was tested on volunteers. It diagnosed type II diabetes with 89% accuracy in women and 86% accuracy in men.
These figures will improve as the technology improves. For the record, scientists found that traditional fasting blood glucose tests were 85% accurate for both sexes, while glycated hemoglobin and oral glucose tolerance tests diagnosed the disease in 91% and 92%, respectively.
The study is published in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings: Digital Health.