Health tech devices and software aren’t developing in a vacuum.  Big data analytics and artificial intelligence including machine learning significantly boost the potential healthcare improvement with sensor-based technology. Voice analysis of huge sample sets, for example, is already the subject of developmental attempts to use the diverse biomarkers in voice to diagnose disease and health conditions. We wrote earlier about Beyond Verbal, a company in Israel studying voice analysis to determine mood. Working in conjunction with the Mayo Clinic, Beyond Verbal also found a biometric voice measure that correlates with heart disease.

Boston-based Sonde Health is exploring voice for diagnosing disease and emotional states with its team of PhDs that includes former staff members from MIT’s Lincoln Labs, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and the Harvard Medical School Department of Neurology. The Sonde Health AI-based platform smartphone component, still in development, will allow help users and their care teams monitor physical and mental health. Remote diagnosis and monitoring via the Sonde Health platform holds the potential to support telemedicine, another fast-developing field reliant on emerging health tech.

These are early days in smart voice analysis. Eventually, however, as historical patient data and larger numbers of current patients’ voices are gathered to build the systems, widespread healthcare changes could be on the way. The day may come, for example,  when instead of having blood work and traveling to your PCP’s office for an annual physical, you can record or stream yourself reading a couple of paragraphs of text in a smartphone app and the resultant data analysis will tell you and your doctors all you need to know.