Startup Aural Analytics raises $4.3M to monitor neurological health by analyzing speech patterns

Aur­al Ana­lyt­ics rais­es $4.3M for voice-based cog­ni­tive health mon­i­tor­ing (Mobi­Health­News):

“Aur­al Ana­lyt­ics, a start­up using speech ana­lyt­ics algo­rithms to gauge changes in brain health, has raised $4.3 mil­lion in seed fund­ing … The arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence engine col­lects speech sam­ples through a smart­phone or tablet app, and uploads these to a cloud serv­er for analy­sis. From these, the com­pa­ny can gen­er­ate insights on the speaker’s neu­ro­log­i­cal health, such as Alzheimer’s dis­ease. The plat­form comes set with APIs so that provider clients can inte­grate these ser­vices across the con­tin­u­um of care.

Star­tups like Neu­roLex, Sonde, Win­terLight Labs have each devel­oped plat­forms that rely on vocal bio­mark­ers such as pitch, vol­ume, vocab­u­lary and oth­er vari­ables to detect phys­i­cal and cog­ni­tive dis­or­ders among speak­ers. Sim­i­lar­ly, Israel and Mass­a­chu­setts-based start­up Beyond Ver­bal has long employed voice clips to detect a speaker’s emo­tion­al health — an area that Bloomberg recent­ly report­ed is also of inter­est to tech giant Amazon.”

News in Context:

• The FDA cre­ates new Dig­i­tal Health unit to reimag­ine reg­u­la­to­ry paths in the age of scal­able, AI-enhanced innovation
• Five rea­sons the future of brain enhance­ment is dig­i­tal, per­va­sive and (hope­ful­ly) bright
• Mind­strong Health iden­ti­fies dig­i­tal bio­mark­ers of cog­ni­tive func­tion using smart­phone data
• Neu­rotech­nol­o­gy can improve our lives…if we first address these Pri­va­cy and Informed Con­sent issues