A new smartphone app can detect Covid-19 in a person’s voice, with a reported accuracy level of 89%. FILE PHOTO: Issei Kato/Reuters
A NEW smartphone app can detect Covid-19 in a person’s voice.
Researchers at the Institute of Data Science, Maastricht University in the Netherlands claimed that they have had “promising results” with the new app, which with the use of a “simple voice recording” and AI technology can reportedly detect whether a person has contracted a case of coronavirus.
Wafaa Aljbawi said: “The 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.”
The researcher went on to explain that the app will be able to give results in “less than a minute” and suggested they could be used for entry into large gatherings.
Speaking at the European Respiratory Society International Congress in Barcelona, Spain, she added: “Moreover, they enable remote, virtual testing and have a turnaround time of less than a minute. They could be used, for example, at the entry points for large gatherings, enabling rapid screening of the population.
“In order to distinguish the voice of Covid-19 patients from those who did not have the disease, we built different artificial intelligence models and evaluated which one worked best at classifying the Covid-19 cases.”
The app, which remains unnamed, is said to have an “average success rate” of 89% and Wafaa added that the technology is a “significant improvement” upon lateral flow tests, which have circulated worldwide throughout the pandemic as a response to gain a rapid result.
She said: “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.”
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