Voice EHR: Introducing Multimodal Audio Data for Health

Large AI models trained on audio data may have the potential to rapidly classify patients, enhancing medical decision-making and potentially improving outcomes through early detection. Existing technologies depend on limited datasets using expensive recording equipment in high-income, English-speaking countries. This challenges deployment in resource-constrained, high-volume settings where audio data may have a profound impact. This report introduces a novel data type and a corresponding collection system that captures health data through guided questions using only a mobile/web application. This application ultimately results in an audio electronic health record (voice EHR) which may contain complex biomarkers of health from conventional voice/respiratory features, speech patterns, and language with semantic meaning - compensating for the typical limitations of unimodal clinical datasets. This report introduces a consortium of partners for global work, presents the application used for data collection, and showcases the potential of informative voice EHR to advance the scalability and diversity of audio AI.

K-Nearest Neighbors based Shock Advice Algorithm for Automated External Defibrillators

Shockable rhythms, namely ventricular fibrillation and ventricular tachycardia, are the main cause of sudden cardiac arrests, which can be detected quickly by the automated external defibrillator (AED) devices. In this paper, a simple but effective algorithm is proposed as the shock advice algorithm applied in AED. The proposed algorithm consists of K-nearest neighbor classifier and an optimal set of 36 features, which are extracted from original ECG and shockable, non-shockable signals using modified variational mode decomposition technique. Cross-validation procedure and sequential forward feature selection are carefully applied to select an optimal set from entire feature space. The performance results show that the MVMD is the key element for SCA detection performance, and the proposed algorithm is simpler while remaining relatively high detection performance compared to previous publications.