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Titel From Alzheimer's to ADHD: what doctors can
diagnose from your voice alone PRESSESPIEGEL
Autor Arielle Duhaime-Ross Quelle The Verge Unternehmen Vox Media, Inc. Veröffentlicht 17.07.2014 Seite 1 von 7
27.1.2016 From Alzheimer's to ADHD: what doctors can diagnose from your voice alone | The Verge
http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/17/5912491/diagnosingsoundscientistsvoicerecordingsParkinsonsADHDAlzheimers 1/7
(Daniela Vladimirova / Flickr)
If Guillermo Cecchi wants to figure out if you've taken MDMA or meth, all he
needs is a computer and a recording of your voice. Cecchi is a computer
scientist at IBM, and part of a growing community of scientists who think our
voices can reveal far more than our sex, age, or cultural origins. He thinks it can
also unlock the mind — and the various psychological and neurological states
our brains may be experiencing at any given time.
From Alzheimer's to ADHD: what doctors
can diagnose from your voice alone
The brave new world of vocal diagnostics
By Arielle Duhaime-Ross on July 17, 2014 12:49 pm
Titel From Alzheimer's to ADHD: what doctors can
diagnose from your voice alone PRESSESPIEGEL
Autor Arielle Duhaime-Ross Quelle The Verge Unternehmen Vox Media, Inc. Veröffentlicht 17.07.2014 Seite 2 von 7
27.1.2016 From Alzheimer's to ADHD: what doctors can diagnose from your voice alone | The Verge
http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/17/5912491/diagnosingsoundscientistsvoicerecordingsParkinsonsADHDAlzheimers 2/7
"This is exactly what psychiatrists do every day: they talk to the patients,"
Cecchi says, "but we used machine learning and mathematics to replicate it."
In a study published earlier this year, Cecchi used recordings of short interviews
to determine which drug his test subjects had been given prior to the
experiment. His results rely largely on language and its meaning. "What we did
on the analytics side was to use machine learning techniques that can measure
things like semantic distance" — the symbolic distance between words with
related meanings. "Chair" and "table" are semantically closer than "chair" and
"flower" for instance. "We can identify individual interviews with high accuracy
with regards to the drugs they took just by computing the semantic distance to
between a handful of concepts."
PEOPLE ON ECSTASY DON’T SAY "LIKE" AND "YOU KNOW"AS OFTEN
With regards to MDMA, those concepts were friendliness, rapport, and
empathy. "There was a higher similarity to these words in the interviews with a
high dose of ecstasy," Cecchi says. He also found that people on MDMA used
fewer "catchphrases" and jargon. When contemporaries talk to each other, "the
word ‘like’ is typically 10 percent of the words." But people on ecstasy don’t use
terms such as "like" and "you know" as often. Their speech, he says, is much
more fluid.
Yet Cecchi’s drugrelated work represents only one example of the information
that our voices contain. He’s also used voice recordings to measure speech
disturbances in manic depressive patients, and people who suffer from
schizophrenia. Moreover, in recent years, scientists have begun to investigate
the voice’s potential for diagnosing Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease,
sleepiness, depression, and even ADHD.
From hyperactive to sleepy voices
Titel From Alzheimer's to ADHD: what doctors can
diagnose from your voice alone PRESSESPIEGEL
Autor Arielle Duhaime-Ross Quelle The Verge Unternehmen Vox Media, Inc. Veröffentlicht 17.07.2014 Seite 3 von 7
27.1.2016 From Alzheimer's to ADHD: what doctors can diagnose from your voice alone | The Verge
http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/17/5912491/diagnosingsoundscientistsvoicerecordingsParkinsonsADHDAlzheimers 3/7
Jorg Langner is a mathematician and musicologist at a Berlinbased company
called AudioProfiling. He think ADHD isn’t just about movement or ability to
focus. That’s why his team is working on diagnosing children with ADHD using
voice recordings. "Speech rhythm of an ADHD child" is different from a child
without ADHD, he says. "The length of syllables are less equal in length." This
is but one example of the measures he makes, and he says that, so far, his
team has classified 1,000 previously diagnosed children with "above 90
percent" accuracy.
THE "SPEECH RHYTHM OF AN ADHD CHILD" IS DIFFERENT
Langner is also developing technology that will detect when someone is too
sleepy to drive. When we’re tired, he says, our "speech rhythm isn’t so precise,
it’s inexact." It’s also "not very pronounced."
Jarek Krajewski, a psychologist at the Rhenish University of Applied Sciences
Cologne, is working on a similar project — except his team wants to apply
sleepiness detection to air traffic controllers. "Sleepiness can be detected with a
classification accuracy of about 7580 percent on unseen speaker, and 8085
percent on known speaker" in a matter of seconds, he wrote in an email to The
Verge.
But detecting sleepy air traffic controllers is just the start for Krajewski. "We
have developed a depressiondetection system based on 200 subjects," he
said. "Another phonetic approach deals with measuring alcoholization, anxiety,
confidence, leadership states or personality." He also wants to build a dataset
for vocal influenza detection.
Neurological clues
Other researchers are taking a more neurological approach. "Our studies
essentially looked at speech patterns in patients with Parkinson’s disease,"
Titel From Alzheimer's to ADHD: what doctors can
diagnose from your voice alone PRESSESPIEGEL
Autor Arielle Duhaime-Ross Quelle The Verge Unternehmen Vox Media, Inc. Veröffentlicht 17.07.2014 Seite 4 von 7
27.1.2016 From Alzheimer's to ADHD: what doctors can diagnose from your voice alone | The Verge
http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/17/5912491/diagnosingsoundscientistsvoicerecordingsParkinsonsADHDAlzheimers 4/7
says Rahul Shrivastav, a speech scientist at Michigan State University. "People
with Parkinson’s experience changes in their voice quality, in the way they
produce their sound, so vowels and consonants aren’t clear," he says. "These
are very subtle, they aren’t not obvious just listening to it, but with a computer
you can do much more."
Shrivastav’s team is in the early stages. So far, they’ve characterized the vocal
changes that occur when the disease is more advanced, but they hope to
replicate the findings in newly diagnosed patients. This is important, he says,
because there’s "no gold standard test. There’s a whole variety of symptoms
that a neurologist will look at and a lot of time they will give the right drugs for
Parkinson’s and if the symptoms go away, then that’s what you have." That
process means that patients can go more than a decade without being
diagnosed — a reality that voice diagnosis, Shrivastav hopes, will be able to
change.
SOME PEOPLE CAN'T TRAVEL TO SEE A NEUROLOGIST. VOICERECORDINGS CAN HELP
Max Little, a research fellow at MIT and the director of the Parkinson’s Voice
Initiative, is also working on developing vocal diagnostic techniques for
Parkinson’s. His team can obtain 99 percent accuracy in labbased diagnostic
tests, but Little notes that getting that level of accuracy isn’t "nearly as easy"
with telephonequality voice recordings. The group is now working on accurate
telephonebased diagnostics. This is crucial, Little says, because many people
can’t travel to a neurologist. "For them, a piece of software running on a
smartphone would be perhaps the only lifeline they have to get useful
information about their symptoms."
Alzheimer’s disease might also hold a future with vocal diagnostics, said
Karmele Lopez de Ipiña, a computer scientist at The University of the Basque
Country in Spain, in an email to The Verge. "The deterioration of spoken
Titel From Alzheimer's to ADHD: what doctors can
diagnose from your voice alone PRESSESPIEGEL
Autor Arielle Duhaime-Ross Quelle The Verge Unternehmen Vox Media, Inc. Veröffentlicht 17.07.2014 Seite 5 von 7
27.1.2016 From Alzheimer's to ADHD: what doctors can diagnose from your voice alone | The Verge
http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/17/5912491/diagnosingsoundscientistsvoicerecordingsParkinsonsADHDAlzheimers 5/7
language immediately affects the patient’s ability to interact naturally with his or
her social environment," she said, "and is usually also accompanied by
alterations in emotional responses." Her team used spontaneous speech
analysis to identify features, like speech fluency, to detect Alzheimer’s disease.
Combined with an emotional response test, the technique boasts over 90
percent accuracy in discriminating Alzheimer’s patients from healthy controls.
The ultimate goal of the research, Lopez de Ipiña said, is to identify the disease
before the first clinical symptoms appear.
Supporting diagnosis
The work done by these researchers differs from Cecchi’s because it relies
more heavily on sounds — and the rhythms at which they’re emitted — than on
language. Ultimately, however, both approaches rely on computers to analyze
the connections that we make in our brains. "What our studies show is that we
can measure mental states analytically without the intervention of a psychiatrist
looking at the interview," Cecchi says.
ELIMINATING PSYCHOLOGISTS AND PHYSICIANS ISN’T THEOBJECTIVE
Of course, eliminating psychologists and physicians isn’t the objective. For
Cecchi, the goal is to "codify" medical interviews for future use, so doctors at
different hospitals in different cities, for instance, can make use of the data
when a patient moves. "Psychiatrists don’t have the time to codify or measure in
a way that can used by different psychiatrists," Cecchi says, adding that "we
aren’t talking about therapy here, but the decision that is made or the diagnosis
that’s made after an interview that happens in 30 minutes."
As for Langner and Shrivastav, both believe that their research will help
strengthen previous diagnostic procedures by supplying an additional layer of
objective testing. "The goal is to prevent misdiagnosis," Langner says. At the
Titel From Alzheimer's to ADHD: what doctors can
diagnose from your voice alone PRESSESPIEGEL
Autor Arielle Duhaime-Ross Quelle The Verge Unternehmen Vox Media, Inc. Veröffentlicht 17.07.2014 Seite 6 von 7
27.1.2016 From Alzheimer's to ADHD: what doctors can diagnose from your voice alone | The Verge
http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/17/5912491/diagnosingsoundscientistsvoicerecordingsParkinsonsADHDAlzheimers 6/7
moment, a kid diagnosed with ADHD will have been tested using
questionnaires and interviews with a doctor. In these instances, Langer says, a
doctor’s impressions are crucial. "In many cases, these are good impressions,"
he says, "but it still has a great subjective component to it."
Private exchanges in foreign tongues
Despite promising results, many challenges remain. One limitation is that some
speech features are very personal and specific to an individual, Cecchi says.
Another is culture. "European languages have a lot of things in common, not
just language, but also culturally," he says, adding that his group has done
voice analyses on people who speak Portuguese, English, and Spanish with
similar results. "Now, what will happen with Chinese — we don’t know."
Langner hypothesizes that results will vary widely. "More problems occur when
we go to Arabic, Farsi, and Mandarin," he says. "I think if you want to work with
these languages, major adjustments will have to be done." But Shrivastav isn’t
so sure. "There are differences across languages," he says, "but there are
some hallmarks of certain diseases that will impact all of the layers in all the
conditions, so the trick is to find those changes."
But the most worrisome aspect of this sort of research is probably the hit to
privacy. "With more and more mobile phones, so much speech is being
recorded and analyzed, it becomes such an easy signal to access," Shrivastav
says. "I think in the next several years you will see a lot more neat things — not
just for speech diagnosis." This is exactly the attitude that some critics worry
about: already, researchers are working on a phone app to help doctors predict
when someone with bipolar disorder might have a manic episode, so it’s
possible that technology will soon be used by the public, and the government.
"AN ORWELLIAN 1984 WORLD WHERE OUR SLEEPINESSSTATE IS NO LONGER PRIVATE."
Titel From Alzheimer's to ADHD: what doctors can
diagnose from your voice alone PRESSESPIEGEL
Autor Arielle Duhaime-Ross Quelle The Verge Unternehmen Vox Media, Inc. Veröffentlicht 17.07.2014 Seite 7 von 7
27.1.2016 From Alzheimer's to ADHD: what doctors can diagnose from your voice alone | The Verge
http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/17/5912491/diagnosingsoundscientistsvoicerecordingsParkinsonsADHDAlzheimers 7/7
"We could suffer from an Orwellian 1984 world where our sleepiness state is no
longer private," Krajewski said. He thinks health and safety concerns may one
day legitimize the use of this technology to monitor emotional and physical
states. Someone who has a cold and is waiting for a bus might not be allowed
inside the vehicle, for example. "According to a publichealth regulation you will
be not allowed to enter public transport — the bus door remains closed for you."
But the potential for that scenario remains years off. It’ll take a lot of time, and
myriad willing participants, to unlock the information that our voices carry,
Langner says. "Our brain is a giant network where everything is connected."
This means that if we have problems in one location, it will have consequences
in other regions of the brain, "especially in the parts that control speech
projection," he says. "From that we hope that we can find traces of many other
illnesses in speech sounds — but to find those solutions will be a very long
process."
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