Speaking Up for Better Health

Sonde Health Inc., a company developing a voice-based technology platform to measure health when a person speaks, announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued the company U.S. Patent No. 10,475,530, a foundational patent that covers crucial aspects of Sonde’s vocal biomarker technology.
 
The patent covers the use of Sonde’s technology to capture, analyze and utilize vocal biomarkers to potentially enable more efficient and timely diagnosis and treatment of disease. As affirmed in the patent, Sonde’s platform is designed to use these vocal biomarkers—derived from analysis of short segments of speech—to evaluate health and wellness and identify when an individual should take additional screening tests or connect with a medical professional. Accelerating disease diagnosis and cueing treatment decisions in this manner could potentially enable people to more quickly seek the care they need for conditions ranging from depression to dementia to allergies. It also holds the potential to significantly cut healthcare costs.
 
“This patent strengthens our mission to harness voice as a vital sign so health and wellness can be quickly, accurately and inexpensively monitored through snippets of speech as short as six seconds in length,” said Jim Harper, Ph.D., co-founder and chief operating officer of Sonde Health. “There is an incredibly broad base of voice-capable consumer devices that are compatible with our platform and enable us to prioritize patient data security as a core feature. We are aggressively pursuing an intellectual property portfolio that complements the technological advances being made by our researchers in this exciting space.”
 
The patent announced today covers additional key aspects of Sonde’s vocal biomarker technology, including its combination with other contextual sensors, integration of voice-based biometrics for user identity verification, and location-based control of vocal biomarker technology activation. The patent also covers the provision of ranked recommendations and scheduling of follow-up care—such as a telehealth session—after voice-based analysis of health and wellness status.
 
Co-founded by PureTech Health, Sonde Health is developing a voice-based technology platform to measure health when a person speaks. Sonde’s proprietary technology is designed to sense and analyze subtle changes in the voice to create a range of persistent brain, muscle, and respiratory health measurements that provide a more complete picture of health in just seconds. To date, Sonde has collected a digital biobank containing millions of data points comprizing voice samples and health metadata from over 20,000 individuals as part of the ongoing validation of its platform. Sonde has broad intellectual property coverage worldwide, currently owning or having exclusive rights to eight patent applications and four issued patents in five families of patent filings.