The Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADFF)’s Diagnostic Accelerator launched the first longitudinal, international study of vocal changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Part of a $100 million effort to develop affordable biomarkers for AD, the study hopes to create the world’s largest database of speech and vocal data to facilitate diagnosis and monitoring of neurodegenerative disease.
Ceros Capital Markets and Peregrine Ventures evidently liked what they heard about Cordio Medical Ltd.’s Hearo voice app that can detect deterioration in patients with congestive heart failure (CHF), leading them to invest $18 million in the company’s latest venture funding round.
Sonde Health struck a deal with Qualcomm Technologies Inc. to embed its vocal health biomarker product, Sonde One, in the Snapdragon 888 and 778G 5G mobile platforms. The deal would make vocal biomarker monitoring native to the devices that use the company’s chips in mobile and IoT devices.
"Step up, speak up" could be the next mantra for COVID-19 screening at airports, universities and large employers if Vocalis Health Inc.'s screening tool takes off – and its recent CE mark approval makes that more likely. Vocalis reported that a large study found the tool, which uses AI-powered vocal biomarkers, had greater than 80% sensitivity and specificity, even in asymptomatic individuals.
The competitive din in the vocal sound diagnostic space rose to new levels as Sonde Health Inc. launched a developer portal to enable other companies to incorporate its vocal biomarker-based health check technology into their apps. Sonde joins a growing number of companies and academic labs around the world talking up the ability of voice recordings to detect a surprising range of diseases.