Alexa, do I have COVID-19?
The future of voice diagnostics
Hi all,
Hope you’re hanging on tight through all the twists and turns of our bananas news cycle. Maybe take a break and read an email newsletter about the indoors?
I’ve got a bunch of events coming up this month, all of which are online and open to the public. Details:
TONIGHT! Yale University Virtual Tea, 7 PM. Free! Register Here
October 14, 2020: 92nd Street Y, City of Tomorrow Summit
October 20, 2020: Conscious Cities Festival, Talk & Panel Discussion: Creating Equitable Education Spaces
October 22, 2020: Emory University, Health & the Human Experience: Author Q&A
October 26, 2020: National Building Museum, Book Talk
Voice Diagnostics
Way back in January (or approximately 5,000 news cycles ago), I started researching a story about the emerging field of vocal diagnostics. In brief, scientists are increasingly using AI and machine learning to search for specific vocal features that correspond to certain diseases, from Parkinson’s to PTSD. The hope is that doctors might one day be able to diagnose, or at least screen for, various diseases simply by analyzing a patient’s voice.
I was just wrapping up my reporting when the pandemic exploded. And some of my sources started getting in touch with updates: They were pivoting, racing to put together studies that would analyze the voices of people who had been diagnosed with COVID-19. To my knowledge, there are at least four different scientific teams, with researchers all over the world, that are now looking for a vocal “fingerprint” of COVID-19. One is already piloting an app that it hopes can be used to triage patients—flagging those who could have the disease just by listening to a sample of their voice. As I write in my new story for Nature:
It’s a sign of how hungry the young field of vocal diagnostics is to make its mark. Over the past decade, scientists have used artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning systems to identify potential vocal biomarkers of a wide variety of conditions, including dementia, depression, autism spectrum disorder and even heart disease. The technologies they have developed are capable of picking out subtle differences in how people with certain conditions speak, and companies around the world are beginning to commercialize them.
For now, most teams are taking a slow, stepwise approach, designing tailored tools for use in doctors’ offices or clinical trials. But many dream of deploying this technology more widely, harnessing microphones that are ubiquitous in consumer products to identify diseases and disorders. These systems could one day allow epidemiologists to use smartphones to track the spread of disease, and turn smart speakers into in-home medical devices. “In the future, your robot, your Siri, your Alexa will simply say, ‘Oh you’ve got a cold,’” says Björn Schuller, a specialist in speech and emotion recognition with a joint position at the University of Augsburg in Germany and Imperial College London, who is leading one of the COVID-19 studies.
But automated vocal analysis is still a new field, and has a number of potential pitfalls, from erroneous diagnoses to the invasion of personal and medical privacy. Many studies remain small and preliminary, and moving from proof-of-concept to product won’t be easy. “We are at the early hour of this,” Schuller says.
It’s a really interesting field of research that also raises some tricky scientific and ethical questions. Check out the full story here.
And here’s a neat graphic the Nature team put together. More context is in the full story.
Indoor Ephemera
Fascinating story: Last year, scientists helped a high school stage a simulation of a pandemic that turned out to be a remarkably good model for the new coronavirus.
As temperatures drop, we’re about to start spending a lot more time indoors. Here are some really useful tips for “how to keep the coronavirus at bay”
The Manhattan Project was an enormous urban planning challenge: “Over the course of three years, more than 125,000 people were residing in these cities that seemed to have popped up almost overnight.”
A carbohydrate found in insect exoskeletons could be a suitable building material for Mars
“Swiss Cat Ladders: Documenting & Deconstructing Feline-Friendly Infrastructure.” (Be sure to check out the photos.)
Four illustrated ideas for the post-pandemic city
Bloomberg has a cool package on home designs in cities around the world—and it looks like they’re going to keep updating it
Can indoor air quality sensors give office workers peace of mind?
“For students in low-income communities, the coronavirus crisis is layered on an existing public health crisis: deteriorated school buildings that are unhealthy places to learn.”
When is it time to abandon hurricane-prone neighborhoods?
The president and provost of Cornell University on how they’re keeping COVID rates low on campus
What we can learn from Twitter, which began exploring new remote work practices and policies even before the pandemic hit
“AI planners in Minecraft could help machines design better cities”
Could mass timber be the next big construction trend?
Bonus Interspecies Animal Content
Stay safe out there!
Emily
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The Great Indoors is now out! You can find it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, IndieBound, or your local independent bookstore. (And if you’ve already read the book, please consider leaving an Amazon rating or review!)
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