Hackensack Meridian Health Invests in AI Software to Assess Anxiety Wellness in Spoken Words

What You Need To Know

• Hackensack Meridian Health and our Bear’s Den Innovation Program are making a strategic investment in Canary Speech, a company that uses vocal analysis to screen for the presence and severity of a variety of targeted diseases, such as anxiety, depression and cognitive decline by assessing digital biomarkers in the human voice.
• The resulting vocal scores can replace subjective measurements with objective, actionable care solutions.

The Voice as a Vital Sign

The human voice inherently reveals both emotional and physiological states. Canary’s technology unlocks voice as a vital sign unto itself, modeling both acoustic and linguistic features to measure stress, mood and energy within the patterns, inflections, and timing of those words. Canary Speech's patented speech analysis technology provides clinical-grade screening for mood states and disease using proprietary machine-learning modeling. Developed by the neurology and speech AI team behind Amazon Alexa, Canary Speech powers first-of-its-kind insight into the full applications of vocal biomarkers in healthcare. Aimed at providing proactive screening in real-time, Canary’s algorithms are built to augment standardized clinical assessments like GAD7 (for anxiety) and PHQ8 (for depression). The company provides clinical-grade screening to detect changing emotional wellness states and mental-health deterioration in real-time. Canary Speech is also researching the assessment of a series of other afflictions through the voice, including Huntington’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, PTSD and others.