Smartphone app listens to your voice for lung disease

Should you be worried that your mobile phone is invading your privacy by listening in to your conversations without your knowledge? Not if the goal is to save your life. Israeli startup Healthymize has developed an app that records all your calls but, rather than send that data to Facebook or Google to sell you products you didn’t even know you wanted, Healthymize listens for signals of COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease).

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If Healthymize detects a negative breathing pattern, a particular kind of cough or deterioration in the caller’s rate of speech (compared with a baseline of previously recorded calls), the app alerts the patient and his or her medical team. Such early intervention can significantly reduce hospitalization and even death. “We don’t want patients to get to the hospital. If they do, that’s already too late,” Healthymize CEO and cofounder Dr. Shady Hassan tells ISRAEL21c. Most COPD patients don’t contact their physician when symptoms begin, but rather wait four or more days. Yet every 24-hour delay doubles the risk of hospitalization, Hassan stresses. Although when Healthymize is released in 2018 it can be used by anyone, the app is intended initially for people already diagnosed with COPD who are at risk for a potentially fatal flare-up.-- More...

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