Testing for dementia among elderly could one day be as simple as talking into a smartphone thanks to speech-analyzing technology being developed by engineers at UNSW Sydney.
An app that uses machine learning technology will look at paralinguistic features of a person’s speech—such as prosody, pitch, volume and intonation—as well as testing memory recall.
Dr. Beena Ahmed from UNSW’s School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications is the engineering researcher leading the development of new algorithms that will be deployed on a population-wide scale using a smartphone app.
“The tool will essentially replace current subjective, time-consuming procedures that have limited…
