An artistic illustration of speech signals moving back and forth between speakers wearing masks.

Vocal biomarkers can indicate COVID-19 infection

A paper published by Lincoln Laboratory researchers describes how speech signals can be used as a nonintrusive method to detect COVID-19.
January 30, 2023
Nature Scientific Reports

In the face of the global pandemic caused by the disease COVID‑19, researchers have increasingly turned to simple measures to detect and monitor the presence of the disease in individuals at home. We sought to determine if measures of neuromotor coordination, derived from acoustic time series, as well as phoneme‑based and standard acoustic features extracted from recordings of simple speech tasks could aid in detecting the presence of COVID‑19.

The results from this analysis highlight the promise of using nonintrusive sensing through simple speech recordings for early warning and tracking of COVID‑19.

This research builds on early findings that Lincoln Laboratory first reported in June 2020 investigating the link between vocal biomarkers and COVID-19.