Experimental App Wants To See If It Can Detect COVID-19 By Listening To Your Voice

Testing for the COVID-19 virus is critical at this point in time. This is because it will help governments identify who has been infected and quarantine them to help stop the spread of the virus. Unfortunately, the problem with the virus is that in some cases, there are those who have been infected but are asymptomatic, meaning that they do not display any signs of being sick.

This is dangerous as it could lead to these people thinking they’re healthy, but they proceed to go out and infect others, who might then develop health complications. The good news is that over at the Carnegie Mellon University, researchers have developed an extremely experimental app that attempts to use your voice recordings to diagnose whether or not you might have the COVID-19 virus.

How it works is that it will ask users to provide voice recordings and follow a set of instructions, such as recording a series of voice prompts as well as coughing into the microphone, and answering some questions about your health. Exactly how effective this app is remains to be seen, but the researchers have placed disclaimers across the website in which they note that it is still experimental and should not be used as a replacement to an actual medical test.

They also note that it has not been approved by the FDA or CDC. Speaking to Futurism, Benjamin Striner, a Carnegie Mellon graduate student who worked on the app, “In terms of diagnostics, of course, it’s never going to be as as accurate as taking a swab and putting it on some agar and waiting for it to grow. But in terms of very easily monitoring a ton of people daily, weekly, whatever, monitoring on a very large scale, it gives you a way to handle and track health outbreaks.”

However, if you don’t mind giving it a whirl, head on over to its website for the details.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Medical
Tags: AI (Artificial Intelligence), Apps, Coronavirus, covid-19, Health, Social Hit