The research project leader will be Dr. Daria Hemmerling from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Automatics, Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering of the AGH University of Science and Technology, who previously identified voice patterns that changed in the development of Parkinson's disease.

The scientists will conduct the study on a sample of 100 patients of the Department of Cardiology of the Upper-Silesian Medical Centre in Katowice. The facility has an anechoic chamber - a room that eliminates reflections of sound, thanks to which the recorded voice is not distorted. Patients with heart failure will talk about a simple text and answer an emotionally neutral question.

The stability of spoken vowels, changes in frequency, amplitude, voice strength, the number and length of breath pauses, the pace of speech - all these parameters in their recorded statements will be analysed. doctors and artificial intelligence will support scientists in the analysis of voice signal parameters. The role of algorithms, or data processing 'recipes', will be to find correlations between changes in the voice signal and specific pathological changes.

According to the researchers, the results of their work could contribute to a faster diagnosis of diseases, and in the future even to the creation of an application or device that would allow patients to check whether their voice has disease markers without consulting a doctor. A few sentences would be enough to know whether to see a cardiologist.

Thanks to special voice processing methods, scientists are able to identify changes that accompany respiratory diseases, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, depression and ADHD.

According to Daria Hemmerling, the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced the popularity of voice technologies. She said: “When we did not have the opportunity to see each other face to face in the doctor's office, it turned out that a significant part of medicine can be transferred to the voice channel, consultations can only take place over the phone. Now we are used to the fact that some services can be provided this way, it simply improves processes. Hence, more companies became interested in it, and this resulted in the involvement of scientific institutions, because in order to introduce something that will be effective, we must test it first.”

Scientists from Kraków will study changes in the voice of people with heart failure thanks to a nearly PLN 50,000 grant awarded by the National Science Centre in the Miniaturacompetition.

PAP - Science in Poland, Beata Kołodziej

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