Vocal biomarker COVID-19 screening tool achieves over 80% accuracy

Vocalis Health, a developer of AI-based vocal biomarker COVID-19 screening tool VocalisCheck, has announced results of a clinical study conducted in collaboration with the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) at its NESCO COVID-19 Centre.

The study included over 2,000 participants who spoke numerous languages including English, Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati. Results from an unblinded validation set of 288 participants demonstrated an AUC of 0.88, which translated to accuracy of 81.2%, sensitivity of 80.3% and specificity of 81.4%.

In addition to the results of this study, Vocalis Health today announced that its COVID-19 screening tool, VocalisCheck, has obtained a CE mark. 

Dr. Shady Hassan, co-founder, chief operating and medical officer of Vocalis Health, said: “PCR testing is being used to screen for COVID-19, which is an extremely expensive, resource-intensive and time-consuming approach. Instead of misusing PCR testing for screening, utilising a highly scalable screening tool like VocalisCheck can fill a significant gap in the current approach to COVID screening, with the ability to effectively funnel those with high risk of infection to the appropriate diagnostic test.”

In the study in India, a symptom checker alone correctly identified approximately 66% of the people with COVID-19 infection, while Vocalis Health’s COVID-19 vocal biomarker achieved more than 80% accuracy in assessing a person’s risk of COVID-19 infection.

Tal Wenderow, CEO of Vocalis Health, said: “We are encouraged by the study’s findings, which further validate VocalisCheck’s ability to screen for COVID-19. These new results, combined with our recent CE-mark approval, demonstrate our commercial readiness to deploy the VocalisCheck screening tool to help businesses, governments, universities and others safely return to work, school, healthcare and leisure while lightening the burden on health systems.”