Diagnose the onset of dementia using your voice and this smartphone app

By Matthew Griffin Enhanced Humans and Biotech 15th May 2018

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Being able to diagnose cognitive conditions using just a smartphone, even if you have no formal access to healthcare, will help millions of people catch the signs of dementia earlier, meaning they can seek treatment sooner.

WinterLight Labs in the US have just announced they’ve developed a “proprietary Artificial Intelligence (AI) based diagnostic platform” that can “objectively assess and monitor cognitive health.”

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In laymans terms this means we now have a way to detect and diagnose cognitive diseases, such as Alzheimers and Dementia using nothing more than a smartphone app and our voice, and it’s the continuation of a trend I’m seeing that’s helping democratise access to healthcare and give hundreds of millions of people around the world who still have no formal access to primary or secondary healthcare access to powerful smartphone based detection and diagnostic tools that help them detect the onset of general disease, heart conditions, inherited genetic disorders, pancreatic cancers, and skin cancer with nothing more than a smartphone and a free app.

Winterlight’s platform uses AI to analyse the users natural speech to detect, diagnose and monitor the appearance and onset of cognitive conditions including Aphasia, Alzheimers, dementia and more by analysing short one minute samples of their speech, and the app can also characterise the speaker’s acoustic, cognitive, and linguistic state, including articulation, lexical diversity, semantic content, and syntactic complexity as well.

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Using samples of a person’s speech, WinterLight’s platform analyses hundreds of linguistic cues and can detect Alzheimers, dementia and other conditions with accuracies between 82 percent and 100 percent, as reported in their peer reviewed academic studies.

WinterLight’s platform also provides major improvements over current pencil and paper tests which can be coarse, challenging, costly, subjective, and time consuming to administer, additionally the platform also has applications in clinical trials, long term and primary care, and speech language pathology, and as the number of people with dementia and other cognitive conditions continues to increase this app couldn’t come soon enough to help people identify their onset, and then, hopefully, help them get the care they need.

Matthew Griffin / About Author

Described by NASA as a "Walking Encyclopaedia of the Future" and one of the world’s most in demand keynote speakers Matthew Griffin, Founder and Futurist in Chief of the 311 Institute, a global Futures and Deep Futures advisory firm, is a multi-award winning Futurist and strategic foresight expert, author, lecturer, mentor, podcast and YouTube host.

With a distinguished career running global business units at Atos, EMC, and IBM today Matthew helps leaders and titans of industry from all over the world explore the impact of the inter sections of technology, culture, and leadership, then helps them create high performance organisations that can continuously disrupt, outpace, and outthink their competition.

15 times author of the hit series the Codex of the Future series Matthew's ability to identify, track, and explain the impacts of hundreds of emerging technologies and trends on global business, culture, and society has earned him a powerful reputation and a roster of clients that include royal households, world leaders across the G7, G20, and G77, and many of the world's most recognised and exceptional organisations including ABB, Accenture, ABN Amro, Adidas, AON, ARM, BCG, Centrica, Citi Group, Coca Cola, Deloitte, Dentons, Disney, Dow, EY, Google, KPMG, Lego, Microsoft, Legal & General, LinkedIn, Nokia, Paramount, PepsiCo, PWC, Qualcomm, RWE, Samsung, T-Mobile, UBS, Visa, WIRED, WPP and hundreds of others.

Matthew is regularly featured in the global media including the AP, BBC, Bloomberg, CNBC, Discovery, Forbes, Khaleej Times, Telegraph, TIME, ViacomCBS, WIRED, and the WSJ, and his mission is to help organisations create a fair and sustainable future whose benefits are shared by everyone irrespective of their ability, background, or circumstances.