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Hearing Your Heart
By not listening to it
Does it sound like someone’s having a heart attack by the way they speak? Or that their arteries are clogged? Beyond Verbal, which just closed a $9M round, pivoted over the past few years from emotion detection to health condition detection through voice.
I’m excited, but hold back with a bit of skepticism. Such technologies offer huge breakthroughs in potential early detection but I await their application and clinical success. This breakthrough reminds me a lot of cancer sniffing dogs. They’re the only dog you don’t want to see come up to you for petting. However, we haven’t heard of huge dog deployments.
Looking ahead, I wonder what is the best way to deploy this tech. Is it on cellphones? Is it in a clinical setting? Is it by calling a number and talking? A web app?
What if services, like Google or Amazon, start doing health assessments with every voice interaction? Maybe it’s a service you can opt into? There’s still some refinement ahead but we may get early warnings of health issues by voice within the next 10 years.
