Alzheimer's can now be detected by AI during a normal phone conversation. Biden, anyone?

Press release:

Phone Calls Spot Early Alzheimer's

— Predictive model identified vocal features of dementia patients from everyday speech

by Judy George, Senior Staff Writer, MedPage Today July 16, 2021

https://www.medpagetoday.com/neurology/alzheimersdisease/93614

Speech patterns in phone conversations can spot people with early to moderate Alzheimer's dementia, a Japanese study suggested.

A machine-learning predictive model correctly identified people with Alzheimer's dementia with about 90% accuracy using audio files of phone conversations of 24 people with confirmed Alzheimer's and 99 healthy controls, reported Akihiro Shimoda, MPH, of McCann Health Worldwide Japan in Tokyo, and co-authors, in PLOS ONE.

People with Alzheimer's disease are more likely to speak more slowly with longer pauses than others, Shimoda and co-authors noted, explaining that people with Alzheimer's spend more time finding the correct word, which produces broken messages that lack speech fluency.

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Full free journal article:

Dementia risks identified by vocal features via telephone conversations: A novel machine learning prediction model

Akihiro Shimoda ,Yue Li ,Hana Hayashi,Naoki Kondo

Published: July 14, 2021

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0253988

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253988