COVID-19 infection in people who show no symptoms, they 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," said Wafaa Aljbawi, a researcher at the Maastricht University, The Netherlands. "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," Aljwabi said. The new test could be used, for example, at the entry points for large gatherings, enabling rapid screening of the population, the researchers said.
COVID-19 infection usually affects the upper respiratory track and vocal cords, leading to changes in a person's voice. Aljbawi and her supervisors used data from the University of Cambridge's crowd-sourcing COVID-19 Sounds App that contains 893 audio samples from 4,352 healthy and non-healthy participants, 308 of whom had tested positive for COVID-19.
The app is installed on the user's phone. The participants report some basic information about demographics, medical history and smoking status, and then are asked to record some respiratory sounds.