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

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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.”

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.

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

Matthew Griffin, described as a "Walking encyclopaedia of the future" by NASA and a futurist polymath, is one of the world's most renowned futurists and strategic foresight experts. A serial entrepreneur Matthew is the Founder and Futurist in Chief of the 311 Institute, a global Futures and Deep Futures advisory firm working across the next 50 years, XPotential University, the world's first free futures and foresight university, and the World Futures Forum which works with the United Nations to solve the worlds greatest challenges. 13 times author of the Codex of the Future series, Matthew is an in demand international keynote, acclaimed university lecturer, and host of the hit Fanatical Futurist podcast.

A rare talent in his past Matthew helped build and run several multi-billion dollar business units for Atos, Dell-EMC, and IBM, and his 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, G7, G20, and G77+ governments, and many of the world's most respected brands including ABB, Accenture, Adidas, AON, ARM, BCG, Centrica, Citi Group, Coca Cola, Dentons, Deloitte, Disney, EY, KPMG, Lego, Legal & General, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Pepsi Co, Qualcomm, RWE, Samsung, T-Mobile, UBS, VISA, and many others. He was also the only futurist invited to talk at the UN COP28 held in Dubai alongside world leaders.

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