A mobile phone app can detect COVID in people's voices.
A new mobile phone app can detect COVID in a person's voice
An infection usually impacts the upper respiratory tract and the vocal cords so researchers decided to analyse changes in voices using an AI model to detect the virus.
The AI model is said to be 89 per cent accurate and is cheap to use, meaning it could be adopted in low-income countries where PCR tests are hard to afford.
The app provides results in less than a minute and is said to be a "significant improvement" on the accuracy of lateral flow tests.
Wafaa Aljbawi, a researcher at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, said: "These promising results suggest that simple voice recordings and fine-tuned AI algorithms can potentially achieve high precision in determining which patients have COVID-19 infection.
"Such tests can be provided at no cost and are simple to interpret. Moreover, they enable remote, virtual testing and have a turnaround time of less than a minute.
"They could be used, for example, at the entry points for large gatherings, enabling rapid screening of the population."