Artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to detect Covid-19 infection in people’s voices by means of a mobile phone app, according to research to be presented on Monday at the European Respiratory Society International Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
One of the main symptoms of Covid-19 is inflammation in the upper respiratory tract and vocal cords, which usually leads to changes in the patient's voice. Therefore, University of Maastricht scientists decided to investigate whether these symptoms could be used as an accurate method for diagnosing the disease, particularly in low-income countries where PCR tests are expensive or difficult to distribute.
With an 89 per cent accuracy rate, the AI model was able to make Covid-19 diagnostics more accurately than rapid antigen tests, according to Wafaa Aljbawi, a researcher at the Institute of Data Science, Maastricht University.
“These promising results suggest that simple voice recordings and fine-tuned...