A national databank of de-identified voices, combined with artificial intelligence, could lead to diagnosing and treating cancer, depression, autism, Alzheimer’s disease and voice disorders.
Vanderbilt University Medical Center is partnering with 11 institutions on a $14 million NIH-funded project led by the University of South Florida and Weill Cornell Medicine that aims to establish voice as a biomarker used in clinical care.
Called Voice as a Biomarker of Health, the project is one of several recently funded by the NIH Common Fund’s Bridge2AI program, designed to use AI to tackle complex biomedical challenges.
The voice project will build an ethically sourced, de-identified database of diverse human voices.
Powell, who was named principal investigator for the project’s Plan for Enhancing Diverse Perspectives (PEDP), is leading this project with co-investigator Toufeeq Ahmed, PhD, MS, assistant professor of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, to promote diversity in team recruitment, patient representation and educational programs.