New voice test detects stress levels in patients
Health service company Cigna Europe is launching a new voice stress detector, Cigna StressWaves Test, designed to evaluate stress levels in 90 seconds using aural indicators
Created with Ellipsis Health, a medical technology developer, the test listens to the pitch, tone, word choice, and pauses in the user’s speech to give a measured reading of their current stress level. The AI is free to use and is based on training a dataset of over 15,000 adults aged from 18-80, ensuring the algorithms were robust enough to cater for different populations with varying accents and levels of English-speaking ability.
In addition to design considerations for age, sex, and education-level, the online test is also interoperable with various systems and on any electronic device if there is a microphone and internet connection. Users are invited to answer open-ended, low-stigma questions for 90 seconds, enabling an algorithm to provide a visualisation using colour and movement of the individual’s stress – from ‘extremely stressed’ to ‘no stress’.
Growing importance of mental health
Mental health problems costing England alone £119 billion last year. Cigna research showed that 71 per cent of people in the UK report being stressed, with 12 per cent experiencing unmanageable stress.
Dr Peter Mills, Associate Medical Director at Cigna Europe, said: “Stress and mental health issues have been pushed up the agenda in recent years. While this increased awareness is a positive change, the pandemic has created many new pressures in our lives. If stress goes unchecked, we may see dramatic consequences and that’s why innovative health tools like the Cigna StressWaves Test are so important.”
The test will not retain the voice recordings once they have been used to produce the stress measurements.