The AI-powered technology is easier to use and more accurate than lateral flow testing, it claims. 1 Researchers have developed an app that can detect Covid in your voice in less than a minute and claim it’s more accurate than lateral flow tests The myCOPD app asks users to cough, take a deep breath and read a short sentence three times. In tests, it correctly identified positive cases 89% of the time and negative cases 83% in less than a minute. Researcher Wafaa Aljbawi, from Maastricht University in the Netherlands, said: “The tests can be provided at no cost and are simple to interpret. “They could be used at entry points for large gatherings, allowing rapid screening.” He said the side-flow tests missed 44 out of 100 positive cases, while the app would only miss 11. However, the app can misdiagnose 17 out of 100 uninfected people, compared to one in 100 for lateral flow. Covid usually affects the upper respiratory tract and vocal cords, leading to changes in a person’s voice. The app uses data from the University of Cambridge, which collected 893 audio samples from 4,352 participants, including 308 Covid patients. The study used a voice analysis technique, the Mel Spectrogram. To distinguish the voices of Covid patients from those without, the team built an artificial intelligence system based on neural networks that mimic the way the human brain works.
