Need early detection of Parkinson’s disease and COVID-19? There’s an app for that.

An artificial intelligence-driven smartphone app developed by an international research team records a person’s voice and takes just 10 seconds to reveal whether they may have Parkinson’s disease and should be referred to a neurologist. A similar diagnostic test was also designed to alert COVID-19 patients to the need for clinical attention, including hospitalization.

These systems are first trained to identify the disease and then to performs an instantaneous analysis of the voice. The diagnostic method recognizes the vocal changes indicative of Parkinson’s disease and COVID-19, based on voice recordings of affected patients and a healthy cohort saying three sounds -- A, O and M. The software then compares the results against existing samples of voices of people with Parkinson's or COVID-19 against those who do not.

Schematic of the process for identifying Parkinson’s disease from healthy controls using sustained phonemes. Source: Mohammod Abdul Motin et al./CC BY 4.0

Collaborators from RMIT University in Australia, Technical University of Košice in Slovakia, University of Surabaya in Indonesia and Rajshahi University of Engineering and Technology in Bangladesh published their research in IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine and IEEE Access.