Wednesday, March 15, 2017

AI Checks Your Head By Listening to What You Said

There’s long been talk in medicine about the need for doctors to listen to patients. Now that advice is being taken literally to diagnose concussions and other hard-to-diagnose brain disorders. Whether caused by a blow to the head during a football game or an accident, concussions are particularly hard to identify.

A Utah-based startup is easing that process using AI and the patient’s voice to detect telltale shifts in vocal patterns — shifts human ears can’t pick up — to help doctors make the right call. The company, Canary Speech, is building voice tests that use GPU-accelerated deep learning to pick up the subtle voice tremors, slower speech and gaps between words that may reveal brain injuries, or warn of diseases such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s.